COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT

                     DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

                STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO

             CS 703:  SEMINAR:  NATURAL-LANGUAGE COMPETENCE
                        Registration No. 321177

                          William J. Rapaport

                               Fall 1988

Computational linguistics can be viewed as a branch of computer  science
that   investigates   computational  methods  of  dealing  with  natural
language.  It covers a spectrum of  activities  that  includes,  at  one
extreme,  "mere"  natural-language  processing (such as dealing with on-
line dictionaries and other text-processing tools); in the middle of the
spectrum  (where  it begins to overlap AI) are such more-or-less natural
language-systems as ELIZA or natural-language front ends for  databases;
and,  at  the  other extreme (where it clearly overlaps AI), it includes
natural-language-understanding and natural-language-generating  systems.
I  use  the  term `natural-language competence' to encompass both under-
standing and generating systems.

This seminar is intended to be a sequel  to  CS  675,  Natural  Language
Understanding,  that  will  study  major AI research on natural-language
competence.  The readings will be drawn primarily from:

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

The topics to be covered will include:

    syntactic models
    semantic interpretation
    discourse interpretation
    language action and intention
    generation

o+    Students registered for the seminar will be expected  to  read  all
     the  articles in the text, as well as, perhaps, supplementary read-
     ings; lead a discussion on one of the articles; and write  a  10-15
     page  paper  and/or  build  (or  modify)  a small (but interesting)
     natural-language system (accompanied by a full report on  the  sys-
     tem).

o+    The  seminar  is  open  (with  permission  of  the  instructor)  to
     interested graduate students in Computer Science, Linguistics, Phi-
     losophy, Psychology, etc.

o+    Time and location to be announced; watch my office door for further
     details.

For further information, contact:

                          William J. Rapaport
                                Bell 214
                       Dept. of Computer Science
                          (716) 636-3193, 3180
                        rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu
                        rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet