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Natural Language Processing
Lecturer: Dr A.A. Copestake
(aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk)
No. of lectures: 8
Aims
This course aims to introduce the fundamental techniques of natural
language processing, to develop an understanding of the limits of
those techniques and of current research issues, and to evaluate some
current and potential applications.
Lectures
- Introduction.
Brief history of NLP research, current applications, NLP system
architecture, knowledge-based versus probabilistic approaches.
- Finite-state techniques.
Inflectional and derivational morphology,
finite-state automata in NLP, finite-state transducers.
- Prediction and part-of-speech tagging.
Corpora, simple N-grams, word prediction, stochastic tagging,
evaluating system performance.
- Parsing and generation I. Generative grammar, context-free
grammars, parsing and generation with context-free grammars, weights
and probabilities.
- Parsing and generation II. Constraint-based grammar,
unification, simple compositional semantics, interfacing to knowledge
bases.
- Lexical semantics. Semantic relations, WordNet, word senses,
word sense disambiguation.
- Discourse and dialogue. Discourse relations, anaphora
resolution, dialogue modelling.
- Applications. Machine translation, email response, spoken
dialogue systems.
Objectives
At the end of the course students should
- be able to describe the architecture of and basic design for a
generic NLP system ``shell''
- be able to discuss the current and likely future performance of
several NLP applications, such as machine translation and email response
- be able to describe briefly a fundamental technique for
processing language for several subtasks, such as
morphological analysis, parsing, word sense disambiguation etc.
- understand how these techniques draw on and relate to other
areas of (theoretical) computer science, such as formal language
theory, formal semantics of programming languages, or theorem
proving
Recommended book
Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J. (2000). Speech and Language
Processing. Prentice-Hall.
Next: Numerical Analysis II
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Christine Northeast
Wed Sep 4 14:43:05 BST 2002