UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO - STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
The Department of Computer Science & Engineering

CSE/LIN 675: COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS - Spring 2000

SYLLABUS

Other relevant links:

• CSE/LIN 675 homepage,
• Directory of Documents,
• newsgroup,
• newsgroup archive.
• /projects/rapaport/675/

PREREQUISITE:

Although knowledge of a programming language will not be required, most students will either be graduate students in Computer Science and Engineering who have had a graduate-level introduction to artificial intelligence (similar to CSE 572), or graduate students in Linguistics, or graduate students in any of the other cognitive sciences (such as Philosophy, Psychology, Communicative Disorders and Sciences, Anthropology, etc.) who feel that their knowledge of either computer science or linguistics is sufficient for them to participate in the course.

PROFESSOR:

Dr. William J. Rapaport, 214 Bell Hall, 645-3180 x 112, rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu

Office Hours: Mondays, 2-3 p.m., and by appointment.

CLASS MEETINGS:

TEXTS:

1. Required:

   • Jurafsky, Daniel, & Martin, James H. (2000), Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), ISBN 0-13-095069-6
     • Copies of the first few chapters will be available at Makin' Copies at The Commons; the text should be in the University Bookstore by February.

   • There will be supplementary readings handed out in lecture.

2. Recommended (available at the University Bookstore):

   • Cole, Ronald (ed.) (1997), Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), ISBN 0-521-59277-1.

   • Shapiro, Stuart C. (1992), Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (New York: W. H. Freeman), ISBN 0-7167-8218-9

3. On Reserve at SEL/UGL:

   • Grosz, Barbara J.; Sparck Jones, Karen; & Webber, Bonnie Lynn (1986) (eds.), Readings in Natural Language Processing (Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann).

   • Winograd, Terry (1983), Language as a Cognitive Process (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley).

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Students should notify the instructor within the first two weeks of class if they have a disability which would make it difficult to carry out course work as outlined (requiring note-takers, readers, extended test time).

There are two main requirements:

1. You must attend virtually all classes, actively participate in class discussions, and turn in all required assignments on time. All assignments and their due dates will be announced in class. (Therefore, be sure to get a classmate's phone number (for instance, 1 or 2 people sitting next to you in class, whoever they are!), so that you will not miss assignments in the unlikely event that you miss a class :-) Assignments will be collected and recorded, but not graded; they will serve as a focus for class discussions. Therefore, no late assignments will be accepted. There may be some small programming-project assignments; these will be team efforts.

2. There will be a term project. This will be a 10-15-page, "typed", double-spaced report (which may, but need not, include an appendix detailing a computational implementation).

   The report might be a review of the literature on some topic, a discussion of some topic not covered fully in class (e.g., connectionist approaches to computational linguistics, or one of the omitted chapters from the text, or a discussion of another topic of your choice, or an implementation of one or more appropriate algorithms from the text, or a team project (such as an implementation of a "full" natural-language-understanding system, with each team member being responsible for a module), or a computational implementation of your choice. If several of you choose to work together on a team project, your report must include a statement clearly outlining each person's contribution. The final report for an implementation project must include an appendix (beyond the 10-15-page report itself) with annotated sample runs and the commented program code.

   Your topic must be approved by me in advance, and a proposal (perhaps in the form of an extended summary) of 6-8 "typed", double-spaced pages or--even better--a first draft must be turned in no later than Monday, March 13.

   The term project is due no later than Thursday, May 4 (= the first day of final exams). Late projects will be accepted at a full-letter-grade-per-day discount (e.g., an A project, 1 day late, gets a B, not an A-).

READING AND STUDYING:

1. I strongly urge you to read as much of the text as possible, including those sections that we do not cover in the course.
2. Not all assigned readings will be covered in lecture (in lecture, we will only cover interesting or hard material, plus occasionally material that is not in the text), but you are responsible for all assigned material in the text, supplementary readings, and lectures.
3. See "How to Read (a Computer Science Text)".
4. For general advice on how to study for any course, see my web page, "How to Study".

GRADING:

Incompletes:

TENTATIVE AND ACTUAL SCHEDULE, IMPORTANT DATES, and READINGS:

Dates	Topics	Required Readings (J&M)	Optional Readings
Jan 19	CCS Speaker: Richard Aslin UR Center for Visual Science	"Statistical Learning in Linguistic and Non-linguistic Domains"	2-3:30pm 280 Park
Jan 19-Jan 26	introduction	Ch. 1	Cole, overview chapters; GJW, Pt. VI
Jan 26-Feb 4	regular expressions, finite-state automata	Ch. 2	Cole, 11.6, 12.4; Eliza handouts
Jan 26	CCS Speaker: Len Talmy Linguistics, UB	"Language Structure and Consciousness"	2-3:30pm 280 Park
Feb 4-Feb 7	morphology, finite-state transducers	Ch. 3	Cole, 3.2
Feb 9	word classes	§8.1	Cole, as above
Feb 9-Feb 11	context-free grammars	Ch. 9	Cole, 3.3, 3.6, 3.7, 11.4
Feb 11-Feb 23	parsing CFGs	Ch. 10	GJW, Chs. 3, 4, 7
Feb 23	CCS Speaker: Jennifer Stolz Psychology, U. Waterloo	"On the Joint Effects of Attention and Word Recognition: The Relations between Resources and Meaning"	2-3:30pm 280 Park
Feb 23-Mar 29	augmented transition networks	GJW, Ch. 5 (!); other handouts	as above
Fri, Mar 3	NO LECTURE
Mar 4-Mar 12	SPRING BREAK
Mon, Mar 13	LAST DATE TO TURN IN TERM-PAPER PROPOSAL
Fri, Mar 17	LAST "R" DATE
Wed, Mar 22	UB CSE Grad Conference
Wed, Mar 22	CCS Speaker: Paul Luce UB Psychology	"Probabilistic Phonotactics, Neighborhood Activation, and Spoken Word Recognition: An Adaptive Resonance Perspective"	2-3:30pm 280 Park
Mar 29-Apr 5	features, unification	Ch. 11	GJW, Ch. 8; and as above
Apr 5-Apr 10	representing meaning	Ch. 14	Cole, 3.5; GJW, Pt. II
Apr 12	CCS Speaker: Nick Cercone Univ. of Waterloo Computer Science	"Natural Language Access to Relevant Information on the Internet"	2-3:30pm 280 Park
Apr 12-Apr 19	semantic analysis	Ch. 15	as above
Apr 19	CCS Speaker: Peter W. Jusczyk Johns Hopkins Psychology	"Infants' use of Multiple Cues to Segment Words from Fluent Speech"	2-3:30pm 280 Park
Apr 21-Apr 28	natural-language processing in SNePS	handouts
Mon, May 1	LAST CLASS; summary & review
Thu, May 4	LAST DATE TO TURN IN TERM PROJECT

ACADEMIC HONESTY: