CSCI (LING) 8570

Natural Language Processing Techniques

Offered every spring.

Information for Spring 2004:

2:30-3:20 p.m. Monday and 2:00-3:15 Tuesday/Thursday     (Correction!)
Meeting in the Artificial Intelligence Center
(Room 111, Graduate Studies Research Center)

Instructor: Dr. Michael A. Covington, mc@uga.edu

Course web site: http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/8570.html

Content: Basic principles of human language; structure of English from a computational point of view; algorithms and techniques for computer understanding of human language.

This is a "hands-on" implementation course for people who already know how to program in Prolog. If you do not know Prolog, it is absolutely impossible to take this course and you should consider taking LING 6570 instead.

Course goals: This course will be somewhat different from what we have done in past years (though similar to Spring 2003). We will concentrate on cooperatively producing some reusable software tools in SWI (ISO) Prolog. See http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/pronto for past work of this type.

We will take the usual topics in a slightly different order than in earlier years. We will do tokenization and morphology first, then chunk parsing, then other types of parsing, and finally semantics.

Prerequisites:

• CSCI/ARTI 4540/6540 (Symbolic Programming)
• ENGL/LING 8150 (formal syntax of English). This requirement is often waived for AI students.
• Knowledge of Prolog so that you can get to work immediately writing programs.
• Knowledge of English so that you can verify that your parsers, generative grammars, and speech synthesizer programming are correct. This involves distinguishing ungrammatical or mispronounced utterances from correct ones. You will be using your own knowledge of English as a source of data for analysis.

Required textbooks:

• Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing
  Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-095069-6
  Ordered by University Bookstore
  Amazon.com Barnes & Noble

• Covington, Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers
  Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-629213-5
  Stocked by University Bookstore
  Amazon.com Barnes & Noble

Caution! If you order your books online, be sure to place the order at least 1 month before the course begins, because we will use the textbooks on the first day. Textbooks are also available at the University Bookstore next to the Tate Student Center on campus.

Requirements:

• Attendance is expected.
• Homework will be assigned and discussed in class; all students are expected to do homework and be ready to present their answers.
• Mid-term and final examinations.
• Term project, which will be a contribution to the class's software development work.

Academic honesty policy: The rules of the University apply to this course.
Note: All graded work is done individually; although projects are part of a larger effort, each project is done by a student working alone. Student projects in this course are published on the Web, so it is extremely important for them to be ready for the scrutiny of the entire scholarly world.