ECE 66900 - Natural Language Processing
Course Details
Credits: 3
Areas of Specialization:
- Education
Counts as:
Normally Offered:
Catalog Description:
This course will introduce students to the linguistic concepts needed to effectively build natural language systems. Focus will be on parsing techniques (students will modify several different types of parsers), logical form, semantic analysis, knowledge representation, discourse analysis techniques, and the impact of natural language systems on speech systems.
Required Text(s):
- Natural Language Understanding , 2nd Edition , James Allen , Pearson, Addison, Wesley , 1994 , ISBN No. 8053-03340
Recommended Text(s):
None.
Lecture Outline:
Lectures | Topic |
---|---|
1 | 1. Human Language Comprehension |
1 | 2. An outline of English grammar |
14 | 3. Parsing with Context-Free Grammars Introduction A. Top-down techniques 1. Top-down RTNS (1) 2. Prolog Parser (1) 3. ATNS a. The small ATN program (1) b. A large ATN program (3) - depth-first vs. breadth-first; morphological analysis; lexicon--what is needed; grammar hacking B. Bottom-up techniques 1. Bottom-up chart parser (1) 2. Tomita Parser and parse forests (2) 3. Bottom-up vs. To-down and Mixed-mode parsing (1) 4. Adding features to parsers (3) 5. Handling passives (1) |
2 | 4. Wh-movement |
2 | 5. Deterministic Parsing |
2 | 6. Semantics and Logical Form A. What is it B. Designing a good logical form (2) |
9 | 7. Semantic Interpretation A. Semantic rules and compositionality (2) B. Semantic grammars 1. Simple semantic grammars (1) 2. Interleaved syntactice and semantic analysis (1) 3. Semantic preferences and interleaving (1) 4. Rule-by-Rule semantics (2) C. Semantic ambiguity, how to deal with it |
3 | 8. Knowledge Representation |
2 | 9. Discourse Structure |
3 | 10. Spoken Natural Language How can NLP help; Text-based vs. spoken; Constraint Dependency Grammars |
3 | 11. In class proposals and presentation of Course Project |
1 | 12. Exams |
Assessment Method:
none