ECE 59500 - Natural Language Processing

Course Details

Lecture Hours: 3 Credits: 3

Areas of Specialization:

  • Computer Engineering

Counts as:

  • EE Elective
  • CMPE Selective - Special Content

Normally Offered:

Each Spring

Campus/Online:

On-campus only

Requisites:

ECE 26400 Minimum grade of B, ECE 36900 Minimum grade of B, ECE30200 Minimum grade of B, MA 26200 or MA 26500 Minimum grade of B, ECE 60000 for graduate students.

Requisites by Topic:

Advanced C Programming, Discrete Math, Probability and Linear Algebra

Catalog Description:

An introduction to modern natural language processing and computational linguistics. Covers morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processing as well as applications such as information extraction, question answering, and machine translation. The course will cover fundamental topics as well as recent advances from the literature.

Required Text(s):

  1. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing , Chris Manning & Hinrich Schutze , MIT Press , May 1999 , ISBN No. 13: 978-0262133609

Recommended Text(s):

  1. Speech and Language Processing , 2nd Edition , Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin , Prentice Hall , ISBN No. 13: 978-0131873216

Learning Outcomes

A student who successfully fulfills the course requirements will have demonstrated:

  • ability to design and implement a natural language parser
  • ability to construct a semantic representation from natural-language input
  • ability to use natural-language technology to construct a new application
  • ability to present research results in NLP to peers

Lecture Outline:

Lectures Lecture Topics
1 Regular expressions and finite state models
2 Hidden Markov models
3 Part of speech tagging
4 Context free grammar and deterministic paring
5 Probabilistic context free grammars and stochastic parsing
6 Neural networks and neural language models
7 First-order logic and semantic representation
8 Montague grammar
9 Information extraction
10 Question answering
11 Machine translation

Assessment Method:

Homework, reports, projects, presentations