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Introduction to Natural Language Processing

CMPSCI 585
Spring 2004

Syllabus

Exact ordering of topics is subject to change.
MS = Manning & Schutze "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing"
JM = Jurafsky & Martin "Speech and Language Processing"

DATE TOPICS RELEVANT
READING		 HOMEWORK
#1, Jan 29, Thu Introduction and Overview MS Ch 1  
#2, Feb 3, Tue Review of probability concepts MS Ch 2.1  
#3, Feb 5, Thu Classification & Introduction to Information Theory MS Ch 2.2 HW#1: Naive Bayes document classification
#4, Feb 10, Tue Noisy channel, N-grams, and Smoothing MS Ch 6  
#5, Feb 12, Thu (continuation of smoothing, and) Collocations MS Ch 5  
#6, Feb 17, Tue Word sense disambiguation and EM MS Ch 7 HW#1 due.
HW#2: EM word sense disambiguation
#7, Feb 19, Thu HW Q&A Assigned reading of MS Ch 3  
#8, Feb 24, Tue Finite state machines
[Guest lecture: Sutton] 		JM Ch 3  
#9, Feb 26, Thu Part-of-speech tagging & Hidden Markov models MS Ch 10, 9 HW#2 due.

#10, Mar 2, Tue

 HMMs and Baum-Welch MS Ch 9 HW#3: HMM Viterbi for POS tagging
#11, Mar 4, Thu Detailed example of HMM, with class participation.    
#12, Mar 9, Tue Lexical acquisition (make-up from Feb 19), mid-term review MS Ch 8  
#13, Mar 11, Thu MIDTERM EXAM    
Mar 16, Tue NO CLASS - Spring Break    
Mar 18, Thu NO CLASS - Spring Break    
#14, Mar 23, Tue Parsing, Chomsky hierarchy, Context-free grammars, top-down and bottom-up parsing JM Ch 9
MS Ch 11 .1 		Project: 1 paragraph proposal due.
#15, Mar 25, Thu The Earley Parser, examples with class participation JM Ch 10.4  
#16, Mar 30, Tue Probabilistic Context-free Grammars, definition and properties, inside-outside algorithm MS Ch 11.2-5 HW#3 due.
#17, Apr 1, Thu Project questions.   Project: 1 page proposal due.
#18, Apr 6, Tue PROJECT PROPOSALS
(and Center for Teaching visitor)
   
#19, Apr 8, Thu Parsing with Probabilistic Context-free Grammars, extensions and practical issues MS Ch 12  
#20, Apr 13, Tue Maximum entropy MS Ch 16.2  
#21, Apr 15, Thu Information extraction 1    
#22, Apr 20, Tue Information extraction 2    
#23, Apr 22, Thu

UMASS HOLIDAY
(Optional class: Rm 142)

MS Ch 13 Project: 1 paragraph progress report due by email.
#24, Apr 27, Tue Machine translation 1
(Slides courtesy of Michael Collins) 		   
#25, Apr 29, Thu Machine translation 2 , plus Decoding section.
(Slides courtesy of Michael Collins) 		   
#26, May 4, Tue

Model-theoretic approaches to syntax, semantics and logic
[Guest lecture: Chris Potts, Linguistics]

   
#27, May 6, Thu

Automatically adding captions to images
[Guest lecture: Victor Lavrenko, CS]

    
#28, May 11, Tue TBD
[Guest lecture: TBD]		   Project: all reports due. (About four pages on (a) problem, (b) why interesting, (c) approach, (d) evaluation.)
#29 May 13, Thu Project presentations
   
May 17, 11am Optional Exam review    
May 18, 10:30pm, LGRT 321 FINAL EXAM
   

Some slide content from Chris Manning, Jason Eisner, Jan Hajic, Mary Harper, Michael Collins, William Cohen.