T-538-MALV and T-725-MALV, Natural Language Processing Fall 2009

• Instructors: Hrafn Loftsson and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson
• Contact: Office at Kringlan 1, 599 6227, {hrafn, hannes}@
• Classes When: Mondays 8:15-9:50 and Thursdays 8:15-9:50
• Classes Where: Kringlan 1, Room K-6

The goal of language technology (LT) is to develop systems which allow people to communicate with computers using natural languages. LT is an interdisciplinary field, requiring knowledge from subjects like linguistics, statistics, psychology, engineering and computer science. This course discusses fundamentals of natural language processing (NLP), which is one of the subfields of LT, and introduces research in the field. Students acquire understanding of the various stages of NLP, e.g. morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, discourse and dialogue. In the course, students work on programming projects related to the aforementioned stages.

The course objectives are that students:

• Know the main methods used in the field of natural language processing
• Are familiar with the main research areas in the field
• Are able to implement a system which processes a 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. Projects are not accepted if handed in more than two days late.

General participation in discussions in class count towards a special participation grade. In addition, M.Sc. level students need to prepare and give one presentation on an existing research paper in the field, which also counts towards their participation grade.

There will be a final written exam counting 30% towards your grade.

The course has an online discussion forum that we can use in any way we see fit. Note that the students have to register on this forum to post their replies (simply go to the address below to register).

Lectures are recorded outside the classroom using the Camtasia program (for Windows). If you have problems listening to and/or viewing the resulting .AVI files, and you are running Windows or Mac, then you probably need the appropriate codec from http://www.techsmith.com/download/codecs.asp. If you are using Ubuntu Linux then you should install a codec with sudo apt-get install ffmpeg and then use mmplayer to view the .AVI files.