UCL - Computational Linguistics

[INGI2263]

[30h + 15h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 2d semester.

Teacher(s): Pierre Dupont(coord.), Cédrick Fairon

Language: English

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

The student completing successfully this course should be able to
- describe the fundamental concepts of natural language modeling
- master the methodology of using linguistic resources (corpora, dictionaries, semantic networks, etc)
and make an argued choice between various linguistic resources
- apply in a relevant way statistical language modeling techniques
- develop linguistic engineering applications

Main themes

- Basics in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics
- Methodology of the building of natural language corpora
- Linguistic resources
- Part-of-speech tagging
- Statistical language modeling (N-grams and Hidden Markov Models)
- Robust parsing techniques, probabilistic context-free grammars
- Linguistics engineering applications such as spell or syntax checking software, POS tagging, document indexing and retrieval, text categorization

Content and teaching methods

- Linguistic essentials: morphology, part-of-speech, phrase structure, semantics and pragmatics
- Mathematical foundations: formal languages, and elements of information theory
- Corpus analysis: formating, tokenization, morphology, data tagging
- N-grams: maximum likelihood estimation and smoothing
- Hidden Markov Models: definitions, Baum-Welch and Viterbi algorithms
- Part-of-Speech Tagging
- Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars: parameter estimation and parsing algorithms, tree banks
- Applications: SMS predictors, POS taggers, information retrieval

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Prerequisites:
SINF1121

Having followed the courses listed below may help but none of them is a strict prerequisite
INGI2262
FLTR2620

Main reference:
- Speech and Language Processing (2nd Edition), D. Jurafsky and J. H. Martin, Prentice-Hall, 2009

Course website
http://www.icampus.ucl.ac.be/claroline/course/index.php?cid=INGI2263:

Additional Reference:
- Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, C. Manning and H. Schütze, MIT Press, 1999.
- The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Ruslan Mitkov (Editor), Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Ingénierie des langues. Sous la dir. de J.M. Pierrel, Hermes Science Publications, 2000.