Introduction to Natural Language Processing (CS 2731 / ISSP 2230), Fall 2011 |
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| Time: | M W 10:00-11:15 | Place | 5313 Sennott Square |
| Professor: | Diane Litman | Office Hours: | M 11:30-1:00 (5105 Sennott Square); Tu 12-1 (741 LRDC); by appt. |
| Email: | litman at cs | Phone: | 412-624-8838 (Sennott Square); 412-624-1261 (LRDC) |
| TA: | Roxana Gheorghiu | Office Hours: | W 2:30-3:30, Th 10-12 (6414 Sennott Square) |
| Email: | roxana at cs | Phone: | 412-624-8443 |
This course provides an introduction to the theory and practice of natural language processing (NLP) - the creation of computer programs that can understand, generate, and learn natural language. We will use natural language understanding as a vehicle to introduce the three major subfields of NLP: syntax (which concerns itself with determining the structure of a sentence), semantics (which concerns itself with determining the explicit meaning of a single sentence), and pragmatics (which concerns itself with deriving the implicit meaning of a sentence when it is used in a specific discourse context). The course will introduce both knowledge-based and statistical approaches to NLP, illustrate the use of NLP techniques and tools in a variety of application areas, and provide insight into many open research problems.
Prerequisites: CS 1501, or consent of instructor. In addition, prior knowledge of the following computer science topics is assumed: Regular Expressions and Finite State Automata; Search; First-Order Logic; Basic Probability; Unix. Finally, Artificial Intelligence is a recommended pre- or co-requisite.
Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin, Second Edition (errata).
For a selection of topics, we will also read some current research papers.
All course information will only be available from Pitt's Blackboard system. To take this class, you must have a Pitt account and use (or forward) your official Pitt email!!
| Topics | Reading |
| Introduction | Ch 1 |
| Regular Expressions and Automata | Ch 2 |
| Words and Transducers | Ch 3 |
| N-Grams | Ch 4 |
| Part of Speech Tagging | Ch 5 |
| Formal Grammars of English | Ch 12 |
| Syntactic Parsing | Ch 13 |
| Statistical Parsing | Ch 14 |
| The Representation of Meaning | Ch 17 |
| Computational Semantics | Ch 18 |
| Lexical Semantics | Ch 19 |
| Computational Lexical Semantics | Ch 20 |
| Computatational Discourse | Ch 21 |
| Dialog and Conversational Agents | Ch 24 |
| TBA (depending on time and interests) | TBA |