Syllabus for LING 571

Deep Processing Techniques for Natural Language Process

Autumn 2005

Instructor: Fei Xia

Time & Location: TR 4:30-5:50pm, MGH 271

Office Hours: Tues: 10am – noon or by appt

Office Phone: (206) 543-9764

Email: fxia at u

(include "Ling571" in the subject line).

Course website: http://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/courses/LING571-Fall2005.html

Course Description:

This course covers algorithms for associating deep or elaborated linguistic structures with naturally 
occurring data (parsing/semantics/discourse), and to produce natural language strings from input 
semantic representations (generation). It also covers various techniques for machine translation. 

Course Texts:

(J&M) Jurafsky and Martin (2000). Speech and Language Processing.

(M&S) Manning & Schuetze (1999). Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.

Other Materials:

Miscellaneous readings as required.

Prerequisites:

Ling 200 or equivalent introductory linguistics course

Stat 391 (Prob. and Stats for CS) or equivalent

Programming:

- C/C++ or Java

- basic unix/linux commands (e.g., ls, cd, ln, sort, head): tutorials on unix

- Perl (optional): tutorials on Perl

Grading:

Homework (80%): 10 assignments: each is worth 100 pts and is due on Thursday.

Class participation (10%), it is worth 125 pts.

Quizzes (10%): They are worth 125 pts in total.

=> 1250 pts in total. Your score is then mapped to [0,4].

Tentative Schedule:

Week	Date	Topic	Reading	Homework
1	9/29	Introduction		Hw1 (due 10/6) (answer)
2	10/4 10/6	Parsing I: Parsing with CFG	J&M 9-10	Hw2-Hw4 (Hw2 due 10/13) Quiz #1 (answer)
3	10/11 10/13	Parsing II: PCFG	J&M 12 M&S 11	Hw3 due 10/20
4	10/18 10/20	Parsing III: Lexicalized CFG	M&S 12	Hw4 due 10/27 Quiz #2 (answer)
5	10/25 10/27	Parsing III: Collins' parser and LTAG	Collins(1997)	Project#1(Hw5)
6	11/1 11/3	Semantics: Meaning representation, semantic analysis, and lexical semantics	J&M 14-16 Fillmore et. al. (2002) Kingsbury et. al. (2002)	Project#2(Hw6-8.and Hw10) (Hw6 due 11/10)
7	11/8 11/10	Pragmatics: Reference resolution Discourse structure	J&M 18-19	Hw7 (due 11/17)
8	11/15 11/17	Dialogue Natural Language Generation	J&M 20	Hw8 (due 11/23)
9	11/22	MT I: MT overview	J&M 21	Hw9 (due 12/6)
10	11/29 12/1	MT I: MT overview (cont) MT II: Word-based SMT	Knight's MT cookbook	Hw10 (due 12/8) Quiz #3 (answer)
11	12/6 12/8	MT II: Word-based SMT (cont) Team Project 2 presentation		Quiz #4 (answer) Final report (due 12/13)