Lecture Notes and Assigned Readings

Date	Lecture Topic and Handouts	Readings	Assignments
Mon 1/26	Introduction (.pdf)	Jurafsky and Martin, Chapter 1.
Weds 1/28	Ambiguity in Language; a Bit o' History (.pdf)	L. Lee. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that'': Linguistics, Statistics, and Natural Language Processing circa 2001. To appear in the National Academies' Study on Fundamentals of Computer Science.
Mon 2/2	Lexical semantics I (.pdf)	J&M: 16.1.	Paper critiques due (2). A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens. Mostow et al. AAAI 94. George Ferguson and James F. Allen, TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant, Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on AI (AAAI-98), Madison, WI, 26--30 July, 1998.
Weds 2/4	Lexical semantics II; WordNet (.pdf)	J&M: 16.2; 16.4; 17.1.
Mon 2/9	Word sense disambiguation: supervised methods (.pdf)	J&M: 17.2. For a description of the relevant background material on probability theory, see Manning and Schutze 2.1.1-2.1.3.
Weds 2/11	Word sense disambiguation: weakly supervised, unsupervised, dictionary-based methods (.pdf)		Paper critique due. Philip Resnik, "Selectional preference and sense disambiguation", presented at the ACL SIGLEX Workshop on Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How?, 1997.
Mon 2/16	SENSEVAL; Spelling correction, pronunciation variation (.pdf)	SENSEVAL: The evaluation of word sense disambiguation systems. J&M, Chapter 5.1-5.5.
Weds 2/18	Noisy channel model (.pdf)		Paper critique due. Ng and Lee, "Integrating Multiple Knowledge Sources to Disambiguate Word Sense: An Exemplar-Based Approach", ACL 1996.
Mon 2/23	Pronunciation variation via the noisy channel model (see notes from last class); Project discussion.	J&M, Chapter 5.7-5.8
Weds 2/25	N-gram models and the statistics of natural language (.pdf)
Mon 3/1	Zipf's law; unsmoothed n-gram models (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 6.1-6.2. Additional material from Manning & Schutze.	Paper critique due. Banko & Brill. "Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation," ACL 2001.
Weds 3/3	Smoothing (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 6.3
Mon 3/8	Linear interpolation and backoff (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 6.4-6.6	Paper critique due. Mostly-Unsupervised Statistical Segmentation of Japanese: Applications to Kanji. Rie Kubota Ando and Lillian Lee. First Conference of the NAACL, pp. 241--248, 2000.
Weds 3/10	Part-of-speech tagging, TBL (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 8.1-8.4, 8.6
Mon 3/15	HMM tagger (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 8.5. The Viterbi algorithm is explained in Chapter 7. Alternatively, see this HMM tutorial.	Project proposals due.
Weds 3/17	Parsing with CFG's (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 9; 10.1-10.3
Mon 3/22	NO CLASS: spring break
Weds 3/24	NO CLASS: spring break
Mon 3/29	Bottom-up chart parsing (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 10.4	Paper critique due. Similarity-Based Estimation of Word Cooccurrence Probabilities. Ido Dagan, Fernando Pereira, and Lillian Lee Proceedings of the 32nd ACL, pp 272--78, 1994.
Weds 3/31	Earley algorithm (see notes from last class); partial parsing (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 10.5-10.6
Mon 4/5	Question-answering systems (.pdf) Guest lecture: Eric Breck
Weds 4/7	Class canceled (sick)
Mon 4/12	Lexicalized and probabilistic parsing (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 12	Project literature survey due.
Weds 4/14	Information extraction (.pdf)
Mon 4/19	Learning extraction patterns (.pdf)	J&M, Chapter 15.5
Weds 4/21	EM (.pdf) Guest lecture: Vincent Ng
Mon 4/26	Theories of Syntax (.pdf) Guest lecture: Veselin Stoyanov
Weds 4/28	Finish IE lecture. Pragmatics and the problem of Inference (.pdf)
Mon 5/3 Weds 5/5	Likely to be NO CLASS
Study week: Mon 5/10 and Tues 5/11	Mon: 10-11:30 Tues: 12-1:30		Project presentations.
Mon 5/17			Project report due.