Natural Language Processing
G22.2590
Spring 2001
Wednesday 5:00 - 6:50
Prof. Grishman
Class information
Schedule of classes.
JET Resources
Handouts (in Word unless noted):
Course Description
The Web, along with intranets and electronic publication, is making vast
amounts of text available on-line. But getting the information we need
out of these texts still involves a lot of searching and reading. Web search
can at best find relevant documents (along with a lot of irrelevant ones);
it doesn't find the facts we need.
This course will consider how methods of natural language processing
can be used to bridge this gap: to extract information from text, and to
answer a user's questions about text and data base information. We will
consider several levels of text analysis, including syntactic analysis
(grammars and parsing), semantic analysis (word and sentence meaning),
and discourse analysis (pronoun resolution and text structure).
During the course you will use and extend a variety of text processing
tools, in Java and possibly in Common Lisp. There will be small weekly
assignments, a term project, and a final exam.
Students should have
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good programming skills (preferably in Java)
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a knowledge of data structures
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some knowledge of formal grammars
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an interest in problems of language or text search
A familiarity with the basics of propositional and predicate logic, and
with elementary statistics, is also helpful but not required.
For further information, contact Prof.
Grishman.