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Advanced Natural Language Processing (2012/2013)

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Course Overview

The course will synthesize recent research in linguistics, computer science, and natural language processing with the aim of introducing students to theoretical and computational models of language. The course will familiarize students with a wide range of linguistic phenomena with the aim of appreciating the complexity, but also the systematic behaviour of natural languages like English, the pervasiveness of ambiguity, and how this presents challenges in natural language processing. In addition, the course introduce the most important algorithms and data structures that are commonly used to solve many NLP problems.

The course will cover formal models for representing and analyzing syntax and semantics of words, sentences, and discourse. Students will learn how to analyse sentences algorithmically, using hand-crafted and automatically induced treebank grammars, how to make monotonic syntactic derivations, and build interpretable semantic representations. The course will also cover a number of standard algorithms that are used throughout language processing. Examples include Hidden Markov Models, the EM algorithm, and state space algorithms such as dynamic programming.

Mailing List

Announcements regarding the course will be posted to the course mailing list. All students taking the course are automatically subscribed to this list. Previous postings can be accessed using the mailing list archive.