Introduction to Natural Language Processing

CMPSCI 585
Fall 2004

Description: The field of natural language processing is concerned with practical and theoretical issues that arise in getting computers to perform various tasks with human languages. In this introductory course you will learn about techniques for filtering junk email, automatically discovering the different meanings of the word "run", efficiently encoding spelling rules, tagging words according to their part of speech, parsing English sentences, extracting from the Web names of companies employing UMass graduates, automatically translating from one language to another, and modeling language semantics. Our work will be a combination of learning new algorithms, discussing linguistics, and programming useful systems that operate on real data.

Whether you are interested in the intersection between the humanities and computer science, or you want a job at Google, this introductory course will help you on your way.