T-538-MALV and T-725-MALV, Natural Language Processing Fall 2007

• Instructors: Hrafn Loftsson and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson
• Contact: Office at Kringlan 1, 599 6227, {hrafn, hannes}@
• Classes When: Tuesdays 8:15-9:50 and Fridays 13:00-14:35
• Classes Where: Kringlan 1, Room K22

One of the most important goals of Human Language Technology, as a field within Computer Science, is to make it possible for people to interact with computer systems using their own natural manner of communication through language. Human Language Technology is an interdisciplinary field that for example relies on knowledge from linguistics, statistics, psychology, engineering and classic computer science. This course focuses on the fundamentals of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an important subfield of Human Language Technology, and introduces state-of-the-art research in the field with particular regard to the Icelandic language. Students will gain understanding of the various stages in language processing, for example morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, discourse analysis and dialog control. Students will get a chance to explore these techniques through programming assignments and an independent project.

On completion of the course students should:

• Understand the fundamental techniques in Natural Language Processing
• Have had an overview of current state-of-the-art research in the field
• Be able to implement systems that rely on natural language

To provide a rich hands-on experience, students will build their own application that relies on NLP over the course of the semester. While the choice of final application is completely in the hands of the students, important NLP components will be built in a series of programming projects that lead up to the final system demonstration. Three homework assignments will also be distributed during the semester to reinforce some of the more theoretical material.

Everything that has to be turned in, including the programming projects, should arrive no later than at 23:59 on the due date, or else incur 10% penalty for each additional day, including weekends and holidays.

Each student will be asked to prepare and give one presentation on an existing research paper in the field. This presentation along with general participation in discussions, online and in class, count towards a participation grade.

You will find information about the exam in this exam preparation document.

After every lecture, the presenter will post a discussion question on an online forum and the students will be asked to contribute to the discussion of that topic until the following lecture. The discussion takes place on an external forum page at the following address. Note that the students have to register on this forum to post their replies (simply go to the address below to register).