CS 601R Course Syllabus
Statistical and Constraint Propagation Approaches to Natural Language Processing
TTh 1:35-2:50pm, 373 MARB
Winter Semester 2004
Irene Langkilde Geary

Office: 3334 TMCB, Email: irenelg@cs.byu.edu, Phone: 2-3020, Office Hours: MWF 2-3, TTh 3-4

Objectives:
  • learn statistical and constraint processing techniques for parsing and generation
  • appreciate real-world computational complexity of natural language

    Prerequisites: CS 330 and CS 470, or instructor's consent

    Textbooks:
  • Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing,
    by Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schutze, MIT Press, 1999.
    Textbook webpage

  • Constraint Processing, by Rina Dechter, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
    Textbook webpage
    Online draft of several chapters

    Readings:
  • Mozart Programming Language Tutorials
  • Constraint Programming for NLP

    Grading Policy:
    55% Exercises
    25% Final Project
    20% Final Exam

    Late Policy:
    There will be exercises due almost every class day. They will receive half credit after one late day, 25% credit after 2 late days, and no credit after that.

    Tentative Schedule:

  • Jan 6 - Introduction - FSNLP Ch 1
  • Jan 8 - Linguistics Essentials - FSNLP 3, Penn Treebank
  • Jan 13 - Functional Dependency Representation - Coding Manual, TBDEP paper
  • Jan 15 - NLP and CSPs; modularizing a generator - Blache, Elhadad et al., Smedt et al.
  • Jan 20 - Constraint Processing Intro - CP 1
  • Jan 22 - Basics - CP 2
  • Jan 27 - cont.
  • Jan 29 - Propagation - CP 3
  • Feb 3 - cont.
  • Feb 5 - Directional Consistency - CP 4
  • Feb 10 - Stochastic Greedy Local Search - CP 7, GLS
  • Feb 12 - cont.
  • Feb 17 - NO CLASS (Pseudo-Monday)
  • Feb 19 - Look Ahead Search Strategy - CP 5
  • Feb 24 - cont.
  • Feb 26 - cont.
  • Mar 2 - Relational Consistency - CP 8
  • Mar 4 - Constraint Optimization - CP 13
  • Mar 9 - cont.
  • Mar 11 - cont.
  • Mar 16 - Mozart Intro - Oz Tutorial 1-6,12
  • Mar 18 - Mozart Finite Domain Constraint Programming - Tutorial 1-4
  • Mar 23 - cont. - Tutorial 5-8
  • Mar 25 - cont. - rest of Tutorial
  • Mar 30 - Mozart Finite Set Constraints - Tutorial
  • Apr 1 - Current work applying constraint techniques to NLP
  • Apr 6 - Essential Information Theory - SNLP 2.2
  • Apr 8 - Machine Translation
  • Apr 13 - Project Presentations
  • Apr 19 - Final Exam 11-2

    Study Guides and Exercises: here

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