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)
- 12 Formal Grammars of English
Context Free Grammars - An Example
Reading Assignment: TAG Book Intro, pg 1-15, TAG tech report, pg, 1-36
Useful background Wh-movement - Wikipedia
- 13 Parsing with Context-Free Grammars
- 14 Statistical Parsing
- 15 Language and Complexity
- 16 Features and Unification
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)
- Tree Adjoining Grammars
- Lexical Functional Grammars
- Combinatory Categorical Grammars
- Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammars
Which grammar would be most effective for: (from papers)
- Phrase structure parses
- Dependency parses
- Construction Grammar
IV: Semantics and Pragmatics (from the book)
- 17 Representing Meaning
- 18 Computational Semantics
- 19 Lexical Semantics
- 20 Computational Lexical Semantics
Which grammar blends the most readily with: (from papers)
- PropBank
- VerbNet
- FrameNet
- 21 Discourse (from the book)
Which grammar provides the most support for coreference? (from papers)
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