CS G224 Natural Language Processing
Course Syllabus Spring 2006

Instructor: Prof. Carole Hafner hafner@ccs.neu.edu, Tel. 617-373-5116
Course web site: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/csg224/

Class Meets: Wednesday, 6-9 p.m. Room 166 West Village H
Prof. Hafner Office Hours: Mon 1:30-3:30; Fri 1:15 - 3:15, 446 WVH

Schedule

Resources

 Assignments

Course Administration and Rules

Jobs in NLP

This course provides an introduction to the computational modeling of human language, the ongoing effort to create computer programs that can communicate with people in natural language, and current applications of the natural language field such as intelligent text retrieval,  information extraction, and question answering. Topics include: computational models of grammar and automatic parsing; statistical language models and the analysis of large text corpuses; natural language semantics and programs that understand language; models of discourse structure; and language use by intelligent agents. Required coursework includes formal and mathematical analysis of language models, and implementation of working programs that analyze and interpret natural language text.

Prereq. Graduate student in computer science or permission of instructor.  Good programming skills and background knowledge of finite state automata (FSA) and basic probability theory are assumed.

The textbook for this class is:  Speech and Language Processing by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Prentice Hall, 2000. Other materials will be provided as handouts or links to Web sites.

Schedule of Topics and Required Readings

WEEK TOPICS                                                                                
READINGS  
1
1/11
Introduction; Part of Speech Tagging
JM Ch 1, 3 - 3.1
New Ch8 (see Resources)
2
1/18
Tagging (cont.): Mathematical Background and Techniques
JM Ch 5.4,5.5,5.8,5.9, 6
3
1/25
Resources and Methodology for Experimental NL Research
See Resources
4
2/1
Introduction to NL Syntax and Parsing
JM Ch 9, 10
5
2/8
 **********NOTE UNUSUAL TIME  3:00 - 6:00 p.m. *****************
Introduction to NL Semantics
JM Ch 14
6
2/15
 Programming a Chart Parser
Lexical Semantics
JM Ch 16
7
2/22
 Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval
Discussion of Term Projects
REVIEW FOR MIDTERM EXAM
JM Ch 17
8
3/1
 Introduction to NL Generation
MIDTERM EXAM 		JM Ch. 20
9
 
Spring Break - no classes

10
3/15
Semantics-driven processing and applications
Ch. 15
11
3/22
Advanced NL Parsing: Unification Grammar
JM Ch. 11
12
3/29
Advanced NL Parsing: Probabilistic Grammars and Parsers
JM Ch 12
13
4/5
Discourse: Reference Resolution and Discourse Level Interpretation
JM Ch. 18
14
4/12
 Conversational Agents: Guest lecture by Prof. Bickmore

 JM Ch. 19
15
4/19
Student Project Presentations

Course Administration and Rules

Approximately one fourth of the course grade will be determined by individual assignments, one half by the midterm and final exams, and one fourth by a term project done in teams. In order to get a passing grade in the course, you must get a passing grade on all three components. Class participation will also be taken into account in determining the course grade.  Late assignments may be discounted, and very late assignments may be discarded.

Academic Honesty: The individual assignments must be each student's own work.  Any group projects assigned must be the work of the students in the group.  Plagiarism or copying will result in official University disciplinary review. Security is an important aspect of computer science. Students are expected to protect their work from plagiarists.

A CCIS Unix account is required to access course materials.  To learn how to get an account, go to: http://www.ccis.neu.edu/welcome

There are no make-up exams in this course.  Normally if a student misses an exam the student will receive a grade of 0 on that exam. Under unusual circumstances (such as documented serious illness), the student's grade on a missed exam will be replaced by the grade on the final exam.
Last modified: February 16, 2006