LING 8570
Natural Language Processing Techniques
Offered every spring.
Information for Spring 2008:
Scheduled meeting time:
2:00-3:15 Tuesday/Thursday and 12:20-1:10 Friday.
Scheduled to meet in Room 531, Aderhold Hall,
but we will almost certainly meet in the Artificial Intelligence Center
(Conference room 110; enter through Room 111, Graduate Studies Research Center)
Instructor: Dr. Michael A. Covington, mc@uga.edu
Course web site: http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/8570.html
Content: Basic principles of human language; structure of English from a computational point of view; algorithms and techniques for computer understanding of human language.
This is a "hands-on" implementation course for people who already know how to program in Prolog. If you do not know Prolog, it is absolutely impossible to take this course and you should consider taking LING 6570 instead.
Course goals: This course will be somewhat different from what we have done in past years (though similar to 2003-2005). We will concentrate on cooperatively producing some reusable software tools in SWI (ISO) Prolog. See http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/pronto for past work of this type.
We will take the usual topics in a slightly different order than in earlier years. We will do tokenization and morphology first, then chunk parsing, then other types of parsing, and finally semantics.
Prerequisites:
- CSCI/ARTI 4540/6540 (Symbolic Programming)
- ENGL/LING 8150 (formal syntax of English). This requirement is normally waived for AI students.
- Knowledge of Prolog so that you can get to work immediately writing programs.
- Knowledge of English so that you can verify that your parsers, generative grammars, and speech synthesizer programming are correct. This involves distinguishing ungrammatical or mispronounced utterances from correct ones. You will be using your own knowledge of English as a source of data for analysis.
Required textbook:
- Covington, Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers
Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-629213-5
Stocked by University Bookstore.
In the University Bookstore, be sure to look in BOTH locations, CSCI 8570 and LING 8570, because it is often missing from one of them but not the other.
Amazon.com Barnes & NobleOptional textbooks:
Caution! If you order your books online, be sure to place the order at least 1 month before the course begins, because we will use the textbooks on the first day. Textbooks are also available at the University Bookstore next to the Tate Student Center on campus.
- Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing
Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-095069-6
Ordered by University Bookstore
Amazon.com Barnes & Noble
- Nugues, An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog
Springer, ISBN 9783540250319
Not stocked by University Bookstore
Amazon.com Barnes & NobleRequirements:
- Attendance is expected.
- Homework will be assigned and discussed in class; all students are expected to do homework and be ready to present their answers.
- Mid-term and final examinations.
- Term project, which will be a contribution to the class's software development work.
Academic honesty policy: The rules of the University apply to this course.
Note: All graded work is done individually; although projects are part of a larger effort, each project is done by a student working alone. Student projects in this course are published on the Web, so it is extremely important for them to be ready for the scrutiny of the entire scholarly world.