CSE 628 Introduction to Natural Language Processing (Spring 2015)

Instructor: Niranjan Balasubramanian

Time: Tue/Thur 1:00 - 2:20 pm

Location: TBD

Overview

NLP technologies are core capabilities for many leading technology industries. Advances in NLP are also critical in the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence. This course will provide an introduction to the basic problems in language processing, the tools and techniques used, as well as advanced research themes. By the end of the course you will be familiar with many NLP tasks and applications. You will also have gained hands-on experience with an exciting NLP project.

Pre-requisite Courses

Familiarity with either Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning is strongly recommended, but not strictly necessary.

Syllabus

The course will provide an introduction to the following application areas:

1. POS Tagging and Chunking
2. Syntactic Parsing
3. Information Extraction
4. Entity Linking
5. Lexical Semantics
6. Information Retrieval
7. Semantic Parsing
8. Question Answering
9. Summarization
10. Machine Translation
11. NLP for Social Media

Course Structure

2-3 Programming assignments -- 30%

Research report + Presentation -- 20%

Final project + Presentation -- 50%

Textbooks

None required. We will mostly use research papers and some material from the following texts:

• Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition,
  D. Jurafsky & James H. Martin,
  Prentice Hall, Second Edition, 2009.
• Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing,
  C.D. Manning & H. Schuetze,
  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999