CSE 507 Computational Linguistics

Spring 2013

Mon / Fri 1:00pm - 2:20pm at [Earth & Space 183]

Instructor:

Yejin Choi (email: ychoi@cs, office: CS-1422, Office Hours: Mon 2:30pm - 4:00pm / Fri 3:30pm - 4:00pm)

Announcements:

Course Description:

• This course intends to provide a general introduction to Computational Linguistics, the study of computational systems to understand and/or generate human language. This class will cover fundamental concepts and techniques in Computational Linguistics, such as lexical semantics, word sense disambiguation, semantic parsing, discourse (including coreference resolution), dialog, summarization, generation. Throughout the class, students will be exposed to some of the recent research papers that connect the concepts learned from the textbook to exciting research questions that are practically motivated. Note that the content of this class will be slightly different from those offered in previous years! In this semester, we will concentrate more on natural langauge generation, i.e., statistical techniques to generate natural language text automatically.
• Textbook: Jurafsky and Martin, SPEECH and LANGUAGE PROCESSING: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition , Second Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008.
• Prerequisites: Familiarity with either Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning is strongly recommended, but not strictly necessary.
  
  
• Grading:
  
  
  (1) Paper Discussion & Critique (20%), Presentation (10%) - Discussion: Everyone must actively participate in each session. You can either make a comment or ask a question. Please try to speak up at least once for each session.
  - Critique: Submit the written critique (no more than 1 page) at the beginning of each session as a print-out. It is recommended that you will bring a printed copy of the paper to the class. You cannot submit your critique after the session. You must NOT copy sentences from the paper into your critique. You must compose your own sentences even when you summarize the paper. The summary of the paper must not go over 1/3 of your critique. Try to write original and concrete ideas that could challenge and/or improve the research presented in the paper. Do not write empty remarks (e.g., ``the paper is really interesting'') or trivial suggestions (e.g., ``the authors should have tried 20 additional classifiers that I know in addition to what they used'').
  - Presentation A group of students (ideally 2 students as a team) will be in charge of one presentation (20 minutes) at the beginning of one of the paper reading classes. (2) Homework 30%
  (3) Final Project 30%
  (4) Class Participation 10%
  
  
• Late submission: Each student may adjust his/her homework deadline upto 7 days throughout the semester without a penalty. (not 7 days for each assignment, but 7 days cumulatively for the entire semester). After then, 10% of score will be subtracted each day. This rule does not apply to the critique submission, which is due at the beginning of the class for the paper discussions. If you're late, then it is considered to be that you decided to skip the corresponding session. This policy is to encourage students to submit quality work, rather than poorly composed work in a hurry. For the purpose of counting late submission, factional values will be rounded up - for instance, late submission by 1 hour is counted as late by 1 day. If there are situations where the application of this rule can be ambiguous, I have the right to apply the rule as I see appropriate. If you have a doubt, consult with me first before making your own assumption.
  
  
• Assignments will be posted to Blackboard

Tentative Syllabus: