Advanced Natural Language Processing

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.

Lecturers: Mark Steedman and Philipp Koehn

Lectures: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 9:00am, WRB G.09.
As of 18th November, the Wednesday lecture will be at 10:00 in a room TBA.

Assessment

There will be three homework assignments (worth 30%).

Assignment 1 was handed out on October 13 and is due October 30.
Assignment 2 was handed out on November 03 and is due November 17 (note extension).
Assignment 3 will be handed out on November 17 and is due November 27.

The rest of the marks (70%) will go on the exam. The exam will be held in DECEMBER, on a date to be determined by ITO.

Syllabus

Exact dates will change and may move around. Topics may shift and change during flight.

No	Date	Topic	Reference	Slides
1	25 Sep	Morphology and Finite State Models (PK)	JM Chapter 2, 3	pdf
2	29 Sep	Language Modelling (PK)	JM Chapter 4	pdf
3	2 Oct	Hidden Markov Models (PK)	JM Chapter 5-6	pdf
4	6 Oct	Spelling Correction and the EM Algorithm (PK)	JM Chapter 5	pdf
5	9 Oct	Maximum Entropy Models (PK)	JM Chapter 6	pdf
6	13-16 Oct	Grammars in the Chomsky Hierarchy (MS)	JM Chapter 12, 16	pdf
7	20-23 Oct	Syntactic Categories (MS)	JM Chapter 12	pdf
8	27 Oct	Grammar Formalisms: GPSG, and LIG (MS)	JM Chapter 12	pdf
9	28-30 Oct	Grammar Formalisms: TAG and CCG (MS)	JM Chapter 15	pdf
10	03-04 Nov	Parsing (MS)	JM Chapter 13	pdf
11	06 Nov	Statistical Parsing (PK)	JM Chapter 14	pdf
12	10 Nov	Statistical Parsing (PK)	JM Chapter 14	pdf
13	11 Nov	Dependency Parsing (MS)		pdf
14	13 Nov	Logical Semantics (MS)	JM Chapter 17	pdf
15	17 Nov	Semantically Compositional Grammars (MS)	JM Chapter 18	pdf
16	18 Nov	Lexical Semantics (PK)	JM Chapter 19	pdf
-	20 Nov	TBA
17	24 Nov	Unsupervised Lexical Semantics (PK)	JM Chapter 20	pdf
18	25 Nov	Lexical Semantics: Categories and Relations (PK)		pdf
19	27 Nov	Discourse: Coreference and Anaphora (MS)	JM Chapter 21	pdf

Lectures are marked as taught by Philipp Koehn (PK) or Mark Steedman (MS).
JM refers to "Jurafsky and Martin", the textbook listed below.

References

When possible, online papers will be made available. As for books, the key reference is:

Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing (2nd Edition), Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition. Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin

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