Course Information

Introduction to computer applications of linguistic theory, including syntactic processing, semantic and pragmatic interpretation, and natural language generation.

This course examines computer applications in the automatic processing of natural language. Students will develop and reinforce foundational skills in the fields of linguistics, probability, statistics, and computer science, as preparation for further study in computational linguistics.

Topics may include:

• Finite state morphology
• Regular expressions
• Formal grammars; Chomsky hierarchy; Context-free grammars
• Bayes' theorem
• N-grams and Language Modeling
• Part-of-speech tagging
• Semantic representations
• Clustering and classifiers
• Evaluation: Precision and Recall
• Algorithms for corpus processing
• Feature-structures and unification-based grammars

Goals

By the end of this course, you will:

• Be familiar with computational linguistic tools and resources, and how they are applied in research in both computational linguistics and other subfields
• Have a sense of the state of the art in this subfield
• Be able to conceptualize problems from the perspective of computational linguistics

Class Time & Location

Lectures: Mondays and Wednesdays 1:30-2:50 p.m.   -   Location: Smith 313
T.A. sections: Fridays 1:30-2:20 p.m.   -   Location: Mary Gates Hall 234

First Class: Monday, April 1, 2013
Last Class: Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Credits: 5

Instructor

Glenn Slayden gslayden@uw.edu Skype: glenn.slayden LinkedIn

Office Hours

I am available to meet with students after class. Additional office hours are via Skype, by appointment.

Teaching Assistant

Sanghoun Song
sanghoun@uw.edu

Office Hours

Prerequsites

• Ling 200 (Intro to Ling. Thought) or Ling 400 (Survey of Ling. Method and Theory)
• Ling 461 (Syntax I), CSE 311 (Foundations of Computing) or CSE 321 (Discrete Structures)
• Although specific computer programming experience is not required, students must be familiar with basic computer use and have an enthusiastic attitude towards developing new computing skills.

  Waiver of these prerequisites only by instructor permission.

Textbook

Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin. (2008) Speech and Language Processing (2nd edition). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Errata
There are multiple versions and printings of the 2nd Edition of Speech and Language Processing. Please follow the appropriate link for your version.

• Prentice Hall Edition, printings 1 and 2.
• Pearson International Edition, printings 1 and 2.

Students with Disabilities

To request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact Disabled Student Services, 448 Schmitz, 206-543-8924 (V/TTY). If you have a letter from Disabled Student Services indicating that you have a disability which requires academic accommodations, please present the letter to the instructor so we can discuss the accommodations you might need in this class.