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COSI 114: Computational Linguistics

News flash: slides for MaxEnt and CRFs have been added.

Brandeis University, Spring 2006

Monday & Wednesday, 2:00pm - 3:30pm, Volen 106

James Pustejovsky Volen 258, jamesp, x62709
José Castaño Volen 110, jcastano, x62743
Marc Verhagen Volen 110, marc, x62745
Anna Rumshisky (TA) Volen 256, arum, x62726
Ben Wellner (TI) Volen 110, wellner, x62743

Course Description

This course provides a fundamental understanding of the problems in natural language processing by computers, and the theory and practice of the current computational linguistic systems. Of interest to students of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the computational processes of comprehension and understanding.

Syllabus

  Topic Readings Assignments Staff
W, Jan 18 Intro to CL   Python Tutorial, not due JC+MV
M, Jan 23 Some history SALP 1   JP
W, Jan  25 Tokenization SALP 2, 3 Tokenizer, due 2/6 MV
M, Jan 30 POS tagging SALP 6, 7, 8   JC
W, Feb 1 POS tagging     JC
M, Feb 6 Chunking   Tagging/Chunking, due 2/17 JC
W, Feb 8 Parsing SALP 9, 10, 11, 12   JC
M, Feb 13 Parsing     JC
W, Feb 15 Parsing     JC
M, Feb 20 no class      
W, Feb 22 no class      
M, Feb 27 Entity Recognition   Parsing Exercise, due 3/10 MV
W, Mar 1 Entity Recognition slides Entity Recognition, due 3/20 MV
M, Mar 6 Semantics: Representing Meaning SALP 14, 15   JP
W, Mar 8 Seminar      
M, Mar 13 Semantics: Compositionality & GL slides, SALP 16   JP
W, Mar 15 Semantics: Types and Coercion   Final Project, due 5/1 JP
M, Mar 20 Learning     JC
W, Mar 22 Learning: MaxEnt slides   BW
M, Mar 27 Learning: CRFs slides   BW
W, Mar 29 TARSQI slides, http://tarsqi.org   MV
M Apr 3 Information Retrieval slides, SALP 17.3   MV
W, Apr 5 Information Retrieval slides   MV
M, Apr 10 Information Retrieval slides Problem Set, due 4/24 MV
W, Apr 12 Question Answering     MV
M, Apr 17 no class      
W, Apr 19 no class      
M, Apr 24 Presentations schedule   class
W, Apr 26 Presentations     class
M, May 1 TBD      

Reference Materials

Assignment Instructions

Assignments are due electronically by 11:59 pm on the date given. Assignments will be charged a 5% late-fee per 24 hour day. They won't be accepted a week after the due date. This policy will be strictly adhered to.

All assignments, except for the final project, are indivual work. You are allowed to discuss your borrow proze and code from other sources as long as you acknowledge it. You will be graded on your own contributions as well as how you incorporate existing code. The invidual assignments count towards the total as follows:

python tutorial   0%
tokenizer   10%
tagging/chunking   5%
parsing   10%
entity recognition   15%
problem set   15%
final project   45%

Code should run on Python version 2.2.3, which will be made available on the machines in the Berry patch. If you use another version, please test it on 2.2.3 before you turn it in. We won't accept code that doesn't run.

To submit electronically, send the assignment to cs114@cs.brandeis.edu.

There is no midterm or final exam, your course grade will be determined by your assignments.

Related Links

Computational Linguistics

Morphology