Schedule of Topics


This is the schedule of topics for Computational Linguistics II, Spring 2005.

Readings are from Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schuetze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, unless otherwise specified. The "other" column has optional links pointing either to material you should already know (but might want to review) or to related material you might be interested in.

Class Topic Readings* Assignments Other
Jan 26 Course administrivia, semester plan; preliminaries
Ch 1, 2.1.[1-9] Do the Jan 26 and Feb 2 readings.
Feb 2 Words and lexical association
Ch 5 Assignment 1 (due 4pm, Feb 9) Dunning (1993), Bland and Altman (1995)
Feb 9 Information theory and N-gram models
Ch 6, Ch 2.2 Assignment 2 (due 4pm, Feb 16)
Feb 16 Smoothing, Hidden Markov models
Ch 6, 9-10
Feb 23 HMMs continued; Probabilistic grammars
Ch 3, 11, Abney (1996) Assignment 3 (due 4pm, Mar 2) Pereira (2000)
Mar 2 Probabilistic grammars, continued
Ch 11 Assignment 4 (due 4pm, Mar 9) Resubmits of Assignment 2
accepted until 4pm today
Mar 9 Guest Lecture: David Chiang
Probabilistic parsing and treebanks
Ch 11, 12 Study! Guidance for studying
Mar 16 Midterm Exam
none
Mar 23 Spring Break
none Relax!
Mar 30 Lexical acquisition
Ch 8 (exc 8.5) Assignment 5 (due 4pm, Apr 13)
Apr 6 Guest lecture: Christof Monz
Similarity and similarity-based methods
Ch 8.5, 15.{1,2,4} Lee? Lin? Resnik?
Apr 13 Word sense disambiguation
Ch 7 Assignment 6 (due 4pm, April 20) Ch 16? Maxent?
Apr 20 WSD and NLP applications
Resnik (2005) book chapter draft
Apr 27 The Web as a corpus
Kilgarriff and Grefenstette (2003); Keller and Lapata (2003); Resnik and Elkiss (DRAFT) Assignment 7 (extra credit, due 4pm May 4) WebExp software for Web-based psycholinguistics; Linguist's Search Engine; Michalcea (2004)
May 4 Parallel text and its uses
Ch 13 Assignment 8 (due 4pm May 11) Resnik (2004); Mihalcea and Pedersen (2003)
May 11 Computational psycholinguistics
Jurafsky and Martin (2000), Sections 12.5 (Human Parsing) and 13.4 (Complexity and Human Processing); Jurafsky (2003) (except Sections 2.1, 2.2, 2.5, 2.6, 3.1, 3.5, 3.6) . Study for final! Lewis (2000), Resnik (1992), Hale syllabus
May 19 Final Exam, 4-6:30pm, CSCI 2107
Officially cumulative but with a strong (at least 80%) emphasis on material after the midterm. Relax! Guidance for studying

*Readings are from Manning and Schuetze unless otherwise specified. Do the reading before the class where it is listed!

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This page last updated 6 May 2005.


Many thanks to David Chiang, Bonnie Dorr, Christof Monz, Amy Weinberg, for discussions about the syllabus. Responsibility for the outcome is, of course, completely indeterminate. :-)