COMS 601: Research Topics -- Computational Linguistics

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Course description: This graduate level research topics course will explore the field of Computational Linguistics.   We will build the framework for addressing the following questions:
        What is important about language?
        What information do we use to understand each other?
        How can we quantify what we know about language so that computers can take advantage of it?
Tools will include finite state machines, language model toolkits, parsers and taggers.  Students will complete a research project with written and oral reports.

Pre-requisites: Graduate standing or permission of the instructor is necessary to register for this class.

Professor: Rebecca Bates (bates@mnsu.edu) 
Contact Information

Course Hours and Location
Lecture: TR 2-3:30pm WH 284

Office Hours
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
4-6** 12-1pm 1-5pm 12-1pm 10-12noon
If things that are useful for the entire class come up, they will be posted on the announcement section of the class webpage so check it regularly.
**Monday is my research day.  Office hours will be available from 4-6pm by appointment only.

Course Materials
Highly-Recommended Text: Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition, Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Prentice Hall, 2000.  The errata for this textbook is online.  Depending on which printing of the book you get, the errors may or may not be present.

Recommended Text: Learning Perl, 3rd Ed., Randall L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, O'Reilly, 2001.

Assignments will come from the text book so it will be worth buying.  Additional reading material will be provided or linked to from here.

Course Syllabus

Course Goals

This course presents an overview of the field of computational linguistics.  Students will have the opportunity to apply programming and algorithm skills to problems within the field of speech and language.  Software tools used in the field will be used for course projects.  All students will have experience using available tools through course assignments.  Research projects will allow for in-depth exploration of a problem, a tool or set of tools, or a corpus.

Grading

Homework, programming assignments, in-class work: 30%
Mid-term Exam: 25%
Final Project: 45% (including written and oral presentations)

Other Information

COMS 601 Handouts and Assignments

Additional Resources

What is Computational Linguistics? One.  Two.  Three.
Speech, Signal and Language Interpretation Lab at the University of Washington
Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University
Links to Speech Resources (from UW SSLI Lab)
Resources and Tools (Stanford University)
Association for Computational Linguistics

Perl quick reference guide
Download Emacs for windows: This site includes a faq on setting up and using emacs.

Finite State Tools: Gertjan van Noord's FSA utilities.  This requires Tcl 8.3.

ATT FSM tools

How can I get information on just about anything?

 

Page last modified by R.A. Bates on 08/26/2007 07:26 PM.