Introduction to Natural Language Processing (CS 2731 / ISSP 2230), Fall 2002 |
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| Time: | Tu Th 1:00-2:20 | Place | 6516 Sennott Square (tentative) |
| Professor: | Diane Litman | Office Hours: | TBA |
| Email: | litman@cs.pitt.edu | Phone: | 412-624-8838 (Sennott Square); 412-624-1261 (LRDC) |
This course provides an introduction to the field of natural language processing (NLP) - the creation of computer programs that can understand, generate, and learn natural language. We will use natural language understanding as a vehicle to introduce the three major subfields of NLP: syntax (which concerns itself with determining the structure of a sentence), semantics (which concerns itself with determining the explicit meaning of a single sentence), and pragmatics (which concerns itself with deriving the implicit meaning of a sentence when it is used in a specific discourse context). The course will introduce both knowledge-based and statistical methods for NLP, and will illustate the use of such methods in a variety of application areas.
Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin. It should be available from the Campus bookstore, as well as from Amazon and other online providers.
Concepts taught in class will be reinforced with assignments (both problem sets and programming), and exams.
| Week | Class | Topic | Reading | Assignments |
| 1 | Aug 27 | Course Overview and Administration | ||
| Aug 29 | Knowledge of Language | Ch 1 | ||
| 2 | Sep 3 | Labor Day Holiday | ||
| Sep 5 | Regular Expressions and Automata | Ch 2 | ||
| 3 | Sep 10 | ...continued | ||
| Sep 12 | Morphology and Finite State Transducers | Ch 3 | HW1 | |
| 4 | Sep 17 | ...continued | ||
| Sep 19 | N-Grams | Ch 6 (through 6.4) | ||
| 5 | Sep 24 | ...continued | ||
| Sep 26 | Part of Speech Tagging | Ch 8 | HW1 due | |
| 6 | Oct 1 | ...continued | ||
| Oct 3 | Context-Free Grammars | Ch 9 | HW2 (please make sure you have the corrected version of question 2).
I understand that some people are having trouble getting the ngram software to work... If you have a cs account, use the machines bert or ernie. Otherwise, Stefanie Bruninghaus has provided her fixes (thanks Steffi!), which seems to work for some other machines (README, Stats, count-unigrams.pl). |
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| 7 | Oct 8 | ...continued | ||
| Oct 10 | Parsing with CFGs | Ch 10 | ||
| 8 | Oct 15 | ...continued | ||
| Oct 17 | Features and Unification | Ch 11 | ||
| 9 | Oct 22 | No class - instructor away | ||
| Oct 24 | No class - instructor away | HW2 due (turn in to Angela Balcita, MIB 212) | ||
| 10 | Oct 29 | Representing Meaning | Ch 14 | |
| Oct 31 | Midterm Exam (covers through Ch 11) | |||
| 11 | Nov 5 | Semantic Analysis | Ch 15 (skip 15.2 though) | |
| Nov 7 | ...continued | |||
| 12 | Nov 12 | Lexical Semantics | Ch 16 | |
| Nov 14 | ...continued; Word Sense Disambiguation | Relevant parts of Ch 17 | HW3. Note: the data you get from Cobuild (Q 4) might be noisy. | |
| 13 | Nov 19 | Discourse | Ch 18 | |
| Nov 21 | Thanksgiving Holiday | |||
| 14 | Nov 26 | ...continued | ||
| Nov. 28 | Dialogue and Conversational Agents | Ch 19 | ||
| 15 | Dec 3 | ...continued | HW3 due | |
| Dec 5 | ...continued; Generation | Ch 20 (sections 1-3) | ||
| 16 | Dec 10 | ...continued; Summing Up | ||
| Dec. 12 | Final Exam (non-cumulative, covers Ch 1, and from Ch 14 on) |