Natural Language Processing

Lecturer: Dr E.J. Briscoe (ejb@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 8

Introduction.

Brief history of NLP research, current applications, the state-of-the-art, knowledge-based versus probabilistic approaches.

Morphology.

Inflection and derivation, finite-state morphology, ambiguity, semi-productivity.

Syntax.

Generative grammar, constituency, ambiguity, descriptive adequacy, a simple unification-based grammar, where are NLs on the Chomsky hierarchy?

Parsing.

(Non-)deterministic parsing, parsing complexity, parsing preferences (garden paths) and modularity, chart parsing.

Semantics.

Truth-conditional semantics, compositionality, syntactically-driven semantics, scope ambiguities, intensionality.

Understanding sentences.

Reference, anaphora, ellipsis, speaker goals.

Understanding discourses.

Structure of discourse/dialogue, intentionality, speech acts, abductive inference, planning, defeasibility.

Applications of NLP.

Database query, machine translation, information retrieval, spoken language understanding, text-to-speech synthesis.

Recommended background reading:

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. Penguin.

Recommended books:

Allen, J. (1987/1995). Natural Language Understanding. Benjamin/Cummings (2nd ed. is the best single book on NLP).

Russell, S. & Norvig, P. (1995). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice-Hall. (Especially Chapter VII, but see III, IV and V for supporting material.)