Natural Language Processing 1


The tutor for this module is Dr. Mark Lee.

Mark has an office hour on Tuesdays at 11 am to 12 pm. Any student is welcome to see him then to discuss the module.
You can also email.

The official module page is at 06-02495 Natural Language Processing 1.

Please check this for the formal information on assessment etc.

The recommended text book for this module is
Speech and Language Processing (2nd edition)
Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J.H.
Prentice Hall, 2008

Module Content
Week Topic
1 Introduction to Module This week's lecture covered:
  • Overview of the module
  • Assessment
  • What is NLP?

The lecture handouts are available here
2 Finite State Networks & Transducers This week's lecture covered:
  • FSNs for NLP
  • Morphology
  • FSTs for Morphology & MT

The lecture handouts are available here
I also gave out a FSN for recognising monosyllabic English words. here
This week's lab work and assessment is available here
3 Grammar This week's lecture covered:
  • Basic English Syntax
  • Context Free Grammars
  • Extending a basic grammar to include

The lecture handouts are available here
I also gave out a series of grammars for English syntax. They are available here
This week's lab work and assessment is available here
4 Parsing This week's lecture covered:
  • Chomsky's hierarchy of grammars
  • Basic parsing strategies
  • Psycholinguistic heuristics for parsing

The lecture handouts are available here
This week's lab work and assessment is available here
5 Chart Parsing This week's lecture covered:
  • Limitations of naive parsing algorithms
  • Well Formed String Tables
  • Chart Parsing

The lecture handouts are available here
This week's lab work and assessment is available here
6 Features This week's lecture covered:
  • Features
  • Directed Acyclic Graphs
  • Chart Parsing

The lecture handouts are available here
This week's lab work and assessment is available here
7 Semantics This week's lecture covered:
  • Meaning Representation
  • First Order Predicate Logic
  • Reification

The lecture handouts are available here
This week's lab work and assessment is available here
8 Semantics This week's lecture covered:
  • Donkey Sentences
  • Discourse Representation Theory

The lecture handouts are available here
The mini project assignment was also distributed. A copy is at here
9 Discourse This week's lecture covered:
  • Cohesion in Discourse
  • Pronoun Resolution

The lecture handouts are available here
A worked example of centuring was also distributed. A copy is at here
10 Pragmatics This week's lecture covered:
  • Speech Act Theory
  • Conversational Implicatures

The lecture handouts are available here
A copy of Robert Frederking's paper also distributed. A copy is at here
11 Summary This week's lecture covered:
  • Learning Outcomes
  • Some Applications
  • The Exam ...

The lecture handouts are available here