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

CSE 740: SEMINAR: CONTEXTUAL VOCABULARY ACQUISITION Spring 2004

SYLLABUS

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Index:	Other Relevant Links:
Course Description	CSE 740 homepage
Prerequisites	Directory of Documents
Instructor	Newsgroup Archive
Class Meetings
Important Dates & Tentative Schedule
Attendance, Newsgroup
CVA Summaries
Final Report
How to Read
How to Study
How to Write
Grading
Incompletes
Academic Integrity

We are developing a computational theory of how natural-language-understanding systems can automatically acquire new vocabulary by determining from context the meaning of words that are unknown, misunderstood, or used in a new sense, and adapting the algorithms for doing this to a curriculum so that these methods can be taught to students in a classroom setting.

We propose:

(a) to extend and develop algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning, from context, meanings for "hard" word: nouns (including proper nouns), verbs, adjectives, and adverbs,

(b) to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and second-language (L1 and L2) acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms, and

(c) to use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build and to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational curriculum for enhancing students' abilities to use deliberate (i.e., non-incidental) CVA strategies in their reading of science, math, engineering, and technology texts at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels: teaching methods and guides, materials for teaching and practice, and evaluation instruments.

The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques will feed back into further development of our computational theory.

The seminar will involve reading research literature on CVA from computational linguistics, psychology, and education; using the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system, and/or using natural-language-processing techniques such as ATN (augmented-transition-network) grammars.

PREREQUISITE:

Dr. William J. Rapaport, 214 Bell Hall, 645-3180 x 112, rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu
Office Hours: To be announced, and by appointment.

IMPORTANT DATES & TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

Note: As the semester progresses, I will adjust some of the dates below to reflect what we actually do in class, rather than on what I hope to do:-)

1. You will be expected to attend and participate in all sessions.

2. You are also welcome to attend either the CVA Research Group meetings on Thursdays, 2:00-3:30 p.m., in Baldy 17, or the SNePS Research Group (SNeRG) meetings on Fridays, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., in Bell 242 (or both, of course :-)

3. You should subscribe to, and regularly monitor, the newsgroup sunyab.cse.740. You may post questions and comments there that are of general interest to the entire class.

4. Students should notify Prof. Rapaport 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 or readers).

The first set of readings will be 2 papers on the CVA project and 3 papers on SNePS (see the reading assignments above).

The second set of readings will be the essays on the Essential CVA Readings webpage. I would like you to read all of them. For at least 10 of the 20 readings from this second set, you must hand in a 2-paragraph critique. There will be no specific due dates for these; read the papers and write the critiques at your own pace. However, please do not hand them all in at once at the end of the semester. There are about 11 weeks in the semester after the required CVA and SNePS readings; so, you should plan on reading approximately 1 per week, starting from the first week!

Each critique should consist of:

1. One paragraph containing a summary of the paper IN YOUR OWN WORDS. (Unquoted and/or unreferenced verbatim passages from the papers will be considered as plagiarism, whether done intentionally or not.)

2. And one paragraph containing your observations on how the paper relates to our CVA project.

These papers will be read and recorded, but not graded. However, the number that you do satisfactorily will be factored into your final grade.

PROJECT & FINAL REPORT

• Your main job besides reading the CVA papers and participating in class discussions will be a computer-based, CVA-related project. See the "Projects" webpage for suggestions.

• At the end of the semester, you will be expected to hand in a conference-style report, typed or printed from a computer file, on 8.5 by 11 inch paper (stapled in the upper left-hand corner, without sprocket holes, and with your own title page), describing the project you worked on this semester. (Please do not use folders or covers, unless your report is too thick to be stapled.) I strongly suggest that you learn to use Latex and ispell.

• The intended audience is the person who will be continuing your project next semester, so the report should be self-contained and detailed enough to tell that (possibly hypothetical) person exactly what has been done, why, what problems were faced, how you solved them, what needs to be done next, and how to get started doing it. This might include a well-documented listing of any code you write or well-commented demos or sample runs. It might also include the syntax and semantics of any new SNePS case frames that you use. In any case, any SNePS networks that you include should be fully explained.

  In the real world, you will be expected to write papers, either for presentation at conferences, publication in journals, or presentation to your boss or co-workers. No one reads computer programs except the programmer him- or herself, or someone else who has to modify the program. Users and other people want to read about the program, what it does, how it works, etc., and to see it in action. Consequently, the main product of your work is the paper, not the program! In the paper, you should say what you have done, and say (in English summary, not in programming detail) how you have done it. It should also include annotated examples of your program in action. These should be well chosen to illustrate the range of performance of your program. The examples should not be redundant, nor included merely because they look complicated. Each example should illustrate a particular ability of your program. Nevertheless, the reader will assume that your program does nothing interesting that isn't illustrated! You should read Goldfain, Albert (2003), "Computationally Defining 'harbinger' via Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition" [PDF], to see an example of a such a paper.

  Any program listings should either be presented as figures throughout the paper, or as an appendix. In either case, any listings should be included as documentation for what you say in the paper.

  Thus, each report must consist of the following components:

  • descriptive title (not: "Project 1")

  • your name, the course number (CSE 740), & date completed (May 1).

  • abstract of project (a 1-paragraph summary)

  • description of the project (the body of the paper), including:
    • syntax and semantics of new SNePS case frames,

    • full explanation of any SNePS networks.

  • list of references (if appropriate)

  • annotated sample runs (could be part of the description of the project) and commented code (could be as an appendix), if appropriate.

• I will provide more detailed information as the semester progresses.

For advice on how to read technical papers in any field (including computer science, psychology, education, etc.), see "How to Read (a Computer Science Text)".

For general advice on how to study for any course, see my web page, "How to Study".

For general advice on how to prepare written reports, see my web page, "How to Write"

For more information on Incomplete policies, see the web page, "Incompletes".

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: