Comparative Topics in Linguistics (from a Computational Perspective)
LING 6520

Spring 2008

Time and Location: Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:45, Muenzinger E114
Course Credit: 3 credit hours
Assessment: Homeworks; Two paper presentations; Term Project.
Office Hours: Tuesday 3-4, Thursday 11-12, Hellems 295
Textbook: Jurafsky and Martin: Speech and Language Processing, Edition 2 (the selected chapters from below will be available as a bulkpack)
Instructor: Martha Palmer

Theme

This course will focus on comparing and contrasting computational grammars and computational lexicons. Tree-adjoining grammars will be taught in depth and their coverage of certain syntactic phenomena will be compared to that of Lexical-Functional grammars, Head-driven Phrase Structured Grammars and Combinatory Categorial Grammars. Comptational lexicons such as WordNet, FrameNet, VerbNet and PropBank will also be discussed in depth. Selected portions of the Jurafsky and Martin NLP textbook (on-line) will be used, as well as journal and conference papers.

Suggested Schedule and Readings


Intro
Chap 1

Overview of NLP

Chap 12-21
Selected chapters from Tree Adjoining Grammars , (eds.) Anne Abeille and Owen Rambow, CSLR Publications, 2000

III: Syntax (from the J&M book)
While reading these chapters we will also be reading the Introduction of the TAG book and consulting specific TAG examples from the TAG Tutorial and the TAG Tutorial Handout .
Different Grammar Formalisms (from papers)
Which grammar would be most effective for: (from papers)

IV: Semantics and Pragmatics (from the book)
Which grammar blends the most readily with: (from papers)
Which grammar provides the most support for coreference? (from papers)

Syllabus Statements:

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