• Instructors: Hrafn Loftsson and Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson
• Teaching Assistant: Örvar Kárason, orvark13@ru.is
• Contact: Office in V207, 599 6227, {hrafn, hannes}@ru.is
• Discussion Classes: Tuesdays 15:45 - 17:20 in M113
• Lab Classes: Thursdays 8:30 - 10:05 in M102

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, in part with regard to the Icelandic language. 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.

On completing the course, students should:

• know the main methods of processing required for computers to analyse and understand texts in a human language
• understand the strengths and weaknesses of current Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology
• know the main models and algorithms used in NLP, such as in morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic analysis, and discourse and dialogue analysis
• know at least one programming language suitable for text processing
• be able to write simple NLP applications and present their work both orally and in writing
• be able to evaluate the performance/accuracy of NLP systems
• be aware of current research in NLP

The course assessment is as follows:

To provide a rich hands-on experience, students will build their own application (a final project) that relies on NLP over the course of the semester. A number of project proposals will be provided by the instructors, but students are also encouraged to come up with their own ideas. Three homework projects/assignments will also be distributed during the semester to reinforce some of the more theoretical material.

Everything that has to be turned in 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.

Students need to hand in at least 70% of the lab projects in order to take the final exam.

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