Schedule of Topics


This is the schedule of topics for Computational Linguistics II, Spring 2007.

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.

THIS SCHEDULE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS!
In addition, some topic areas may take longer than expected, so keep an eye on the class mailing list or e-mail me for "official" dates.

Class Topic
Readings* Assignments Other
Jan 24 Course administrivia, semester plan; corpus-driven and computational linguistics
Ch 1, 2.1.[1-9] (for review)
Word counts; tokenization; frequency and Zipf's law; concordances
Assignment 0 Corpus Colossal (The Economist, 20 Jan 2005); Language Log; Resnik and Elkiss (DRAFT); Linguist's Search Engine
Jan 31 Words and lexical association
Ch 5
Collocations; mutual information; hypothesis testing
Assignment 1a, Assignment 1b Dunning (1993), Bland and Altman (1995)
Feb 7 Information theory, n-gram models
Ch 2.2, Ch 6
Information theory essentials; entropy, relative entropy, mutual information, perplexity; noisy channel model; maximum likelihood estimation
Assignment 2
Feb 14 Cancelled: snow
Feb 21 Smoothing
Ch 9-10
Smoothing methods
Assignment 3 An empirical study of smoothing techniques for language modeling (Stanley Chen and Joshua Goodman, Technical report TR-10-98, Harvard University, August 1998);
Revised Chapter 4 from the updated Jurafsky and Martin textbook.
Feb 28 Probabilistic grammar
Ch 11-12, Abney (1996)
HMM review (forward and Viterbi algorithms, EM using the forward-backward algorithm); PCFGs; inside probabilities; revisiting EM with the inside-outside algorithm; lexicalized and dependency-based models;
Pereira (2000); Detlef Prescher, A Tutorial on the Expectation-Maximization Algorithm Including Maximum-Likelihood Estimation and EM Training of Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars; McClosky, Charniak, and Johnson (2006), Effective Self-Training for Parsing
Mar 7 Cancelled: snow
Mar 14 Beyond CFG; Parser Evaluation and NLP Evaluation in General
History-based grammars; dependency representations; evaluation paradigms for NLP; parser evaluation;
Mar 21 Spring Break
Have fun!
Mar 28 Supervised classification
Ch 16
Supervised learning -- k-nearest neighbor classification; naive Bayes; decision lists; decision trees; transformation-based learning (Sec 10.4); linear classifiers; the maximum entropy principle and maxent models; feature selection
Take-home midterm handed out Other useful readings include Adwait Ratnaparkhi's A Simple Introduction to Maximum Entropy Models for Natural Language Processing (1997) and A Maximum Entropy Model for Part-Of-Speech Tagging (EMNLP 1996); Adam Berger's maxent tutorial; and Noah Smith's notes on loglinear models.
Apr 4 Word sense disambiguation
Ch 7; Resnik, "WSD in NLP Applications" (Ch 11 in Edmonds and Agirre (2006))
Characterizing the WSD problem; WSD in applications; WSD evaluation; unsupervised methods/Lesk's algorithm; supervised techniques; semi-supervised learning and Yarowsky's algorithm
Assignment 4
Apr 11 Information Retrieval
Ch 8.5, 15.{1,2,4} Lecture slides
Apr 18 Guest lecture (Smaranda Muresan) on graph-based methods in NLP
(a) Rada Mihalcea and Paul Tarau, TextRank: Bringing Order into Texts, in Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2004), Barcelona, Spain, July 2004.; (b) Rada Mihalcea, Graph-based Ranking Algorithms for Sentence Extraction, Applied to Text Summarization, in Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, companion volume (ACL 2004), Barcelona, Spain, July 2004; (c) Paper/data of Pang and Lee on sentiment analysis with min-cuts

PageRank and variants; HITS; min-cuts

Team Project Lecture slides.
Optional readings of interest: (a) Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schutze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press: Chapter 21 "Link Analysis"; (b) Page L. et. al Page Rank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web; (c) Jon Kleinberg Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, in proceedings of SODA 1998 (d) Kurt Bryan and Tanya Leise, The $25,000,000,000 Eigenvector: The Linear Algebra Behind Google (SIAM Review 48(3), 2006, pp. 569-581)
Apr 11 The Web as a Corpus
(a) A. Kilgarriff and G. Grefenstette, Introduction to the special issue on the web as corpus, Computational Linguistics 29(3): 333-348 (2003)
(b) Lapata, Mirella and Frank Keller. 2004. The Web as a Baseline: Evaluating the Performance of Unsupervised Web-based Models for a Range of NLP Tasks. Proc HLT/NAACL, pp. 121-128.
(c) Lapata, Maria. 2001. A Corpus-based Account of Regular Polysemy: The Case of Context-sensitive Adjectives., Proc NAACL.
(d) Philip Resnik, Aaron Elkiss, Ellen Lau and Heather Taylor. The Web in Theoretical Linguistics Research: Two Case Studies Using the Linguist's Search Engine., Proc. 31st Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 265-276, February 2005.

What is a corpus?; using the Web for NLP tasks; ways linguists can use the Web.

Also of possible interest: Linguist's Search Engine;
Mirella Lapata, and Frank Keller. 2005. Web-based Models for Natural Language Processing. ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing 2:1, 1-31. (Extends Lapata and Keller 2004);
WebExp software for Web-based psycholinguistics
May 2 Machine translation
Ch 13 and Adam Lopez, A Survey of Statistical Machine Translation, Techreport LAMP-TR-135/CS-TR-4831/UMIACS-TR-2006-47, University of Maryland, College Park, April 2007

Historical view of MT approaches; noisy channel for SMT; IBM models 1 and 4; HMM distortion model; going beyond word-level models

Also potentially useful or of interest: Kevin Knight, A Statistical MT Tutorial Workbook;
Mihalcea and Pedersen (2003);
Philip Resnik, Exploiting Hidden Meanings: Using Bilingual Text for Monolingual Annotation. In Alexander Gelbukh (ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2945: Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, Springer, 2004, pp. 283-299.
May 9 Phrase-based statistical MT Papineni, Roukos, Ward and Zhu. 2001. BLEU: A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation

Components of a phrase-based system: language modeling, translation modeling; sentence alignment, word alignment, phrase extraction, parameter tuning, decoding, rescoring, evaluation.

Take-home final handed out Koehn, PHARAOH: A Beam Search Decoder for Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation; Koehn (2004) presentation on PHARAOH decoder

*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 25 April 2007.


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. :-)