| Lectures: | Tuesdays, Thursdays 4-5:15, Engineering Lab 305 |
| Instructor: | David Smith ( |
| TA: | Jason Naradowsky ( |
| Office hours: | Smith: W 1:30-3:30, Th 5:15-6:15,
or by appointment, in CS Building 358 Naradowsky: T 5:15-6:15, W 1-2, in CS Building 264 |
| Class email list: |
Manning and Schütze's excellent Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing is available online from the UMass library or in stores.
Bird, Klein, and Loper's Natural Language Processing with Python is available at the NLTK site.
| Date | Topic | Readings | Assignments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tue Sep 8 | Course Overview: Why NLP? [slides] | ||
| Thu Sep 10 | The Chomsky Hierarchy, Grammars, and
Hand-Crafted
NLP [McCallum's slides on regular expressions] | Manning & Schütze, chapter 3 | Homework #1 due Sep. 24 |
| Tue Sep 15 | Counting Things: Text Classification and N-gram Models [slides] | M&S 2.1 | |
| Thu Sep 17 | Counting Things (cont'd): Text Classification and N-gram Models [slides] | M&S 6 | |
| Tue Sep 22 | No Class: CS Graduate Research Methods Seminar | ||
| Thu Sep 24 | Estimation: Maximum Likelihood and Smoothing [slides] | Homework #1 due | |
| Tue Sep 29 | Hidden Markov Models: Inferring Hidden Tags and Segmentations [slides] | M&S 9 | |
| Thu Oct 1 | Hidden Markov Models: Message Passing with the Viterbi and Forward-Backward Algorithms [slides] | ||
| Tue Oct 6 | Context-Free Grammars: Inferring Hidden Trees [slides] | M&S 11 | Homework #2 assigned, due Oct. 15 |
| Thu Oct 8 | Context-Free Parsing: Chomsky Normal Form, the CKY Algorithm, and Probabilistic Parsing [slides] | ||
| Tue Oct 13 | Context-Free Parsing: Outside Computations and Earley's Algorithm [slides] (Holiday: makeup for Sep. 22) | ||
| Thu Oct 15 | Context-Free Parsing: Adding Features and Improving Efficiency [slides] | M&S 12 | Homework #2 due |
| Tue Oct 20 | Practical Parsing: Lexicalized Models and Algorithms [slides] | ||
| Thu Oct 22 | Midterm | ||
| Tue Oct 27 | Log-Linear (Maximum Entropy) Models and Conditional Likelihood [slides] | NLTK ch. 6 | |
| Thu Oct 29 | Log-Linear Models with Structured Outputs [slides] | ||
| Tue Nov 3 | Log-Linear Models with Structured Outputs (with examples from dependency parsing) [slides] | ||
| Thu Nov 5 | Semantics [slides] | NLTK ch. 10 | |
| Tue Nov 10 | Computational Semantics [slides] | ||
| Thu Nov 12 | Lexical Semantics [slides] | M&S 5, 7 | |
| Tue Nov 17 | Lexical Semantics 2 [slides] | ||
| Thu Nov 19 | Machine Translation: Overview and Word Alignment [slides] | ||
| Tue Nov 24 | Machine Translation: Non-Parallel Text [slides] | ||
| Thu Nov 26 | Holiday: Thanksgiving | ||
| Tue Dec 1 | Machine Translation: Searching for Good Translations [slides] | ||
| Thu Dec 3 | Machine Translation: Training [slides] | ||
| Tue Dec 8 | Information Extraction and Question Answering [slides] | NLTK ch. 7 | Homework #3 assigned |
| Thu Dec 10 | NLP and Linguistics [slides] | ||
| Tue Dec 15 | Review Session: same time, same place [slides] | ||
| Wed Dec 16 | 10:30 a.m., Computer Science Building 142: Final Exam |