Natural Language Generation (2008)

Course information

Lecturer

Johanna Moore, 1R22, 2 Buccleuch Place,

Meeting times

Lectures:

Aims and objectives

The area of study called natural language generation (NLG) investigates how computer programs can be made to produce high-quality natural language text or speech from computer-internal representations of information. Motivations for this study range from highly theoretical attempts to understand how people produce text and speech (linguistic, psycholinguistic) to entirely practical efforts to produce natural language output for a wide range of applications, including automatic explanation from advisory systems, automatic summarisation from single or multiple documents, machine translation, dialogue systems, tutorial systems, and many more.

This course will provide:

Context

This course assumes that students have taken Introduction to Computational Linguistics and have prior progrramming experience.

Useful textbook

Ehud Reiter and Robert Dale (2000) Building Natural Language Generation Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Teaching methods

This course will consist of lectures, student presentations and discussions.

Assessment

Students will be assessed on performance on:

  1. Oral Presentations consisting of two items:
    • An individual presentation on a seminar topic based on 2-3 papers from the seminar reading list (35%)
    • Participation in seminar discussion, including completion of peer review forms providing anonymous feedback on student presentations (15%)
  2. A term project/paper, which is due on Monday, 31 March 2008 and is considered a type of examination (50%)

Syllabus

Note: After introductory lectures by the lecturer, there will be student presentations and student-led discussions. The papers listed here are suggestions for each category, and which we read will depend on student interest. We will read many, but not all of the papers listed here.

The problem of natural language generation is typically viewed as a three-stage process: We will cover each of these topics in detail, and then consider applications of language generation theories and technologies.

Readings

See the course reading list.

Software available for course projects, and some fun demos to play with

Other Useful Links

The following web pages may prove useful during the course.


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