COMP 7930 Natural Language and Speech Processing:


TEXTS:

James F. Allen. Natural Language Understanding. Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park, CA, 1987.


TOPICAL OUTLINE

Introduction:

The history of the field, an overview of the current issues and applications.

Syntax:

Context-free grammar and chart parsing [14, 10], unification-based grammars [21], principle-based grammar and parsing [3, 15, 20].

Semantics:

Meaning and logical form [9], handling semantic ambiguity [16], lexical conceptual structures [18], taxonomies of nouns and verbs [2], semantic interpretation algorithms [16].

Statistical methods:

Taggers [6], statistical parsers [4], concordances [2], collocations [23], and statistical machine translation [5, 11].

Natural language interfaces:

Question-answering processes, dialog structure (focus, conversation rules, etc.) [22], pragmatic issues (speech acts, presuppositions, mutual beliefs, conversational maxims, etc.) [12, 13], language generators [7].

Machine translation:

Basic theory and technology [17, 19], transfer vs. interlingua mapping techniques [8].

Information extraction:

Objectives, evaluation criteria and case studies [24, 25].

Speech recognition:

Phonetic models: Gaussians, connectionist, context-dependence, duration modeling; lexical models: Hidden Markov Models; grammar models: n-gram modes; recognition algorithms: Viterbi, Stack-Decoding;

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
N.B.: # means "available in the department (instructor or reading room collection)" * means "available in the Unversity of Manitoba library" (2) means items of secondary importance

JOURNALS:


REFERENCES:

[1]# James F. Allen. Natural Language Understanding. Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park, CA, 1987.

[2]# R. Beckwith, C Fellbaum, D. Gross, and G. Miller. "WordNet: a lexical database organized on psycholinguistic principles." In Uri Zernik, editor, Lexical Acquisition: Using On-Line Resources to Build a Lexicon. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1991.

[3]# Robert C. Berwick, Steven P. Abney, and Carol Tenny, editors. Principle-Based Parsing: Computation and Psycholinguistics. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

[4]# Ezra Black, John Lafferty, and Salim Roukos. Development and evaluation of a broad-coverage probabilistic grammar of English-language computer manuals. In Proceedings of ACL-92, pages 185-192, Newark, Delaware, 1992.

[5]# Peter F. Brown, Stephen A. Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, and Robert L. Mercer. "The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter estimation." Computational Linguistics, 19(2):263-311, June 1993.

[6]# Doug Cutting, Julian Kupiec, Jan Pedersen, and Penelope Sibun. " A practical part-of-speech tagger." In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pages 133-140. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1992.

[7]# R. Dale and E Reiter. "Generating definite np referring expressions." Computational Linguistics, 1992.

[8]# Bonnie Dorr. Machine Translation: A view from the lexicon. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

[9]* David R. Dowty. Word meaning and Montague grammar: the semantics of verbs and times in generative semantics and in Montague's PTQ. Dordrecht, Boston, 1979.

[10] Jay Earley. "An efficient context-free parsing algorithm." ACM Communications, 13:94-102, 1970.

[11]#William A. Gale and Kenneth W. Church. "A program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora." In Proceedings of 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 177-184, 1991.

[12]*Gerald Gazdar. Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form. Academic Press, 1979.

[13]#Georgia M. Green. Pragmatics and natural language understanding. L. Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, N.J., 1989.

[14]#B. Grosz, K. Sparck-Jones, and B.L. Webber. Readings in Natural Language Processing. Morgan Kaufmann, 1986.

[15]*Liliane Haegeman. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991.

[16]#Graeme Hirst. Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity. Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1987.

[17]*J.W. Hutchins and H. Somers. An Introduction to Machine Translation. Academic Press, London, 1992.

[18]*R. Jackendoff. Semantic Structures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

[19]*John Lehrberger. Machine translation: linguistic characteristics of MT systems and general methodology of evaluation. J. Benjamins Publishing, 1988.

[20]#Dekang Lin. "Principle-based parsing without overgeneration." In Proceedings of ACL-93, pages 112-120, Columbus, Ohio, 1993.

[21]*Carl Pollard and Ivan A. Sag. "Information-Based Syntax and Semantics" Volume 1: Fundamentals. CSLI Lecture Nodes. CSLI, Stanford University, 1987.

[22]#C.L. Sidner. "Focusing for interpretation of pronouns". Americal Journal of Computational Linguistics, 7:217-231, 1981.

[23]#Frank Smadja. "Retrieving collocations from text: Xtract". Computational Linguistics, 19(1):143-178, 1993.

[24]# Beth Sundhiem, editor. Proceedings of the Forth Message Understanding Conference. ARPA, 1992.

[25]# Beth Sundhiem, editor. Proceedings of the Fifth Message Understanding Conference, Baltimore, MD, 1993. ARPA.