SI 661 / EECS 595 / LING 541
		     Natural Language Processing

			      Fall 2005
			Thursdays 2:30-5:30 PM
			    412 West Hall


Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the study of the computational
treatment of natural language. NLP draws on research in Linguistics,
Theoretical Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, Artificial
Intelligence, Psychology, etc.

The course has three major parts:

- Linguistic, mathematical, and computational background 
- Levels of linguistic processing: morphology, syntax, semantics,
  discourse, pragmatics 
- Applications: information retrieval, speech processing, text
  generation, machine translation, information extraction, etc. 

It also serves three major goals:

- Learn the basic principles and theoretical issues underlying natural
  language processing 
- Learn techniques and tools used to develop practical, robust systems
  that can communicate with users in one or more languages 
- Gain insight into many open research problems in natural language


READINGS:

Speech and Language Processing (Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin)
Prentice-Hall, 2000 ISBN: 0-13-095069-6


ASSIGNMENTS:

Four homework assignments (40%) 
Midterm (15%) 
Final project (20%)
Final exam (25%)
Additional requirements for SI PhD students


SYLLABUS:

Introduction (JM1)
Linguistic Fundamentals
Regular Expressions and Automata (JM2)
Morphology and Finite-State Transducers (JM3)
Word Classes and Part of Speech Tagging (JM8)
Context-Free Grammars for English (JM9)
Parsing with Context-Free Grammars (JM10)
Features and Unification (JM11)
Natural Language Generation (JM20)
The Functional Unification Formalism (Handout)
Lexicalized and Probabilistic Parsing (JM12)
Language and Complexity (JM13)
Representing Meaning (JM14)
Semantic Analysis (JM15)
Discourse (JM18)
Rhetorical Analysis (Handout)
Dialogue and Conversational Agents (JM19)


PROJECTS:

Each student will be responsible for designing and completing a
research project that demonstrates the ability to use concepts from
the class in addressing a practical problem. A significant part of the
final grade will depend on the project assignment. Students can elect
to do a project on an assigned topic, or to select a topic of their
own.

The final version of the project will be put on the World Wide
Web, and will be defended in front of the class at the end of the
semester (procedure TBA). In some cases (and only with instructor's
approval), students may be allowed to work in pairs when the project's
scope is significant.


SAMPLE PROJECTS:


Noun phrase parser 
Paraphrase identification
Question answering
NL access to databases
Named entity tagging 
Rhetorical parsing
Anaphora resolution
Entity crossreference 
Document and sentence alignment
Encyclopedic knowledge extraction
Information extraction 
Speech processing
Semantic analysis