Course pages 2014–15
Natural Language Processing
Lecturer: Professor Ann Copestake
No. of lectures: 12
Suggested hours of supervisions: 3
Prerequisite courses: Mathematical Methods for Computer Science, Logic and Proof, and Artificial Intelligence I
Aims
This course introduces the fundamental techniques of natural language processing. It aims to explain the potential and the main limitations of these techniques. Some current research issues are introduced and some current and potential applications discussed and evaluated.
Lectures
The order of delivery of the lectures is provisional.
- Introduction.
Brief history of NLP research, current applications,
components of NLP systems.
- 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.
- Context-free grammars and parsing. Generative grammar, context-free
grammars, parsing with context-free grammars, weights
and probabilities. Limitations of context-free grammars.
- Constraint-based grammars. Constraint-based grammar,
unification.
- Compositional semantics.
Simple compositional semantics in constraint-based grammar.
Compositional semantics with
lambda calculus.
Inference and robust entailment.
- Lexical semantics.
Semantic relations, WordNet, word senses,
word sense disambiguation.
- Distributional semantics.
Representing lexical meaning with distributions. Similarity metrics.
Clustering.
- Discourse and dialogue. Anaphora
resolution, discourse relations.
- Language generation.
Generation and regeneration.
Components of a generation system. Generation of referring
expressions.
- Computational psycholinguistics.
Modelling human language use.
- Applications.
Examples of practical applications of NLP techniques.
Objectives
At the end of the course students should
- be able to discuss the current and likely future performance of
several NLP applications;
- be able to describe briefly a fundamental technique for
processing language for several subtasks, such as
morphological processing, parsing, word sense disambiguation etc.;
- understand how these techniques draw on and relate to other
areas of computer science.
Recommended reading
* Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J. (2008). Speech and language processing. Prentice Hall.
For background reading, one of:
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. Penguin.
Matthews, P. (2003). Linguistics: a very short introduction. OUP.
Although the NLP lectures don’t assume any exposure to linguistics, the course will be easier to follow if students have some understanding of basic linguistic concepts.
For reference purposes:
The Internet Grammar of English, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/home.htm