Description

Understanding the human language by machines is one of the important topics in computer science. There is a large range of tools and technologies for natural language processing that are used by many users in daily life: from the simplest cases such as spell checkers and grammar checkers to more complicated systems such as speech recognition, machine translation, question answering, email categorization, hand writing recognition, and search engines.

Processing natural language is divided into two main parts:

end to end applications that are frequently used by many people,
intermediate techniques that are the core part of different applications.

In this lecture, the main techniques and applications of natural language processing will be introduced. In addition we briefly describe language modeling and machine learning concepts that are required to deal with language processing techniques and applications.

Organizational information

Lecturer: Dr. Saeedeh Momtazi
3 Credit Points
Schedule: Thursdays, 09:15 - 10:45
Room: HS 3
Mailing List: nlp2012(at)hpi(dot)uni-potsdam(dot)de

Schedule and Materials

Date	Topic(s)	Slides
12.04.12	Introduction to Language Techonoly	Session-1.pdf
19.04.12	Language Modeling	Session-2.pdf
26.04.12	Machine Learning for NLP	Session-3.pdf
03.05.12	Part of Speech Tagging Named Entity Recognition	Session-4.pdf
10.05.12	Parsing	Session-5.pdf
17.05.12	Public Holiday
24.06.12	No Lecture
31.05.12	Lexical Semantics Word Sense Disambiguation Word Similarity	Session-6.pdf
07.06.12	Text Categorization Sentiment Analysis	Session-7-1.pdf Session-7-2.pdf
14.06.12	Information Retrieval Relation Extraction	Session-8-1.pdf Session-8-2.pdf
21.06.12	Question Answering	Session-9.pdf

Exercises

Exercise 1:
- Task: implement the probabilistics CKY algorithm that use a set of rules R. The rules will be sent to the mailing list. For the start up you can use the small set of rules from the slides.
- Deadline: 30.05.2012
Exercise 2:
- Task: finding similar words based on their context in a corpus. The detailed description will be sent to the mailing list.
- Deadline: 20.06.2012

Course Book

SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING

An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition

by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin

Second Edition

Assessment

Examination at end of semester
Prerequisite for attending the exam:
- Attending lectures regularly
- Submitting exercises

Topics

Introduction {2 x 2h}

Introduction to Language Technology
Language Modeling

Machine Learning for NLP {2 x 2h}

Learning Techniques
Classification Algorithms
Clustering Algorithms

NLP Techniques {5 x 2h}

Part Of Speech Tagging
Syntactic Analysis
Named Entity Recognition
Lexical Semantics
Word Similarity
Word Sense Disambiguation
Semantic Role Labeling

NLP Applications {5 x 2h}

Text Categorization
Sentiment Analysis
Information Retrieval
Information Extraction
Relationship Classification
Question Answering
Summarization
Machine Translation