Introduction to Natural Language Syntax and Parsing

Class Debates

Every Monday a group of 3 students will present a debate on a linguistic topic (listed below). One student will present arguments for the statement and one against, the third student will introduce, sum up and chair questions. You can prepare together and you needn't yourself believe in the position you are presenting. The debate will take approximately half of the session. Participation in the a debate is a compulsory component of the course for which you will receive a tick (worth 10% of the final grade for this course).

Session 3 17/10/22 17 PoS tags are sufficient.
Session 5 24/10/22 ((NP V) NP) is a preferable analysis to (NP VP).
Session 7 31/10/22 Universal dependencies are sufficient to describe all languages.
Session 9 7/11/22 CCG is a preferable formalism to Dependency Grammar.
Session 11 14/11/22 NLP technology represses linguistic creativity.
Session 13 21/11/22 Popular evaluation methods hinder the progress of NLP tech.

Practical

• Practical: Parse the designated set of sentences with two contrasting parsing systems, to yield representations of their grammatical relations and/or phrase structure (and/or logical forms). Evaluate the performance of the tools quantitatively and qualitatively.

There will be an assessed practical report based on the practical described above. The practical report will consist of a description of the work done of not more than 5000 words. It will contribute 90% of the final module mark. The deadline for handing in completed reports is midday on 17th January 2023.