Computer Science
System Software

Introduction to Computational Linguistics

Lecturer

Asst. Prof. Pavlina Ivanova
Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics
University of Plovdiv
Bulgaria
Email: pavlina@pu.acad.bg

Course

1 hour per semester (geblockte KV),
acceptable under "Spezielle Kapitel aus Softwareentwicklung" in the Computer Science Curriculum.
The course is given in English.

Dates

Tuesday, May 2 2006 10:15 - 12:45 T 911
 Skipped
Wednesday, May 3 2006 10:15 - 12:45 HS 2
 Slides (1), Exercise 1
Thursday, May 4 2006 10:15 - 12:45 HF 9904
 Slides (2), Exercise 2
Friday, May 5 2006 10:15 - 12:45 K 224B
 Slides (3), Exercise 3
Monday, May 8 2006 16:15 - 18:45 MZ 003B
 Slides (4), Exercise 4, Project
Wednesday, May 17 2006
 10:15-12:45
 HS 2, exam

Course Description

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the fundamental concepts and ideas in computational linguistics, including computational approaches to language modeling, methods and techniques for the processing of human (natural) language, as well as recent applications in the area. The focus is on methods and algorithms for morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging and parsing.

What is Computational Linguistics, by Hans Uszkoreit

 Topics:

  1. Overview: levels of language representation, difficulties of language processing, tasks, a brief history and applications (machine translation, information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization …).
  2. Regular Expressions and Finite-State Automata.

Computational Morphology: finite-state transducers (FST), morphological parsing.

Tokenization and Spelling.

  1. Resources for Natural Language Processing: corpora, dictionaries, WordNet.

Part-of-Speech Tagging: rule-based, stochastic and transformation-based.

  1. Context-Free Grammars for English.

Parsing: top-down, bottom-up, bottom-up filtering, chart parsing.

Finite-State Parsing Methods.

  1. Feature Structures and Unification.

Parsing with Unification Constraints.

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  1. Semantic analysis and discourse.

Natural Language Generation.

 Required text:

Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition, Prentice Hall, 2000.

 Reference texts:

The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, edited by Ruslan Mitkov, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Handbook of Natural Language Processing, edited by R. Dale, H. Moisl, H. Somers, Marsel Dekker Inc., 2000.