Instructor: Robert C. Berwick	TA: Karen Kohl
Email: berwick@ai.mit.edu	Email: ktkohl@ai.mit.edu
Office: 35-423	Office: NE43-809
Phone: (617) 253-8918	Phone: (617) 253-0778
Office hours: Weds 1-3 and by appointment	Office hours: Tu 4-6pm

IMPORTANT CLASS MESSAGES - New on this course's web pages:

• To repeat: for background, if you are unfamiliar with the terminology of describing sentence structure, like NP=Noun Phrase, and for an overall, but quick reference grammar for English, please read the pdf document here.
• Lecture 11 slides posted here and in 2-up bw format here.
• Lecture 10 slides posted here and in 2-up bw format here.
• Lecture 9 slides posted here and in 2-up bw format here.
• Extra documentation for the parser is here. It is also in the course locker, under /mit/6.863/earley/docnew.pdf
  
• Laboratory 3 now posted here. It is also in the course locker, under /mit/6.863/earley/lab3.pdf
  
• Lecture 8 slides posted here and in 2-up bw format here.

Prerequisites & Relation to Other Courses

Assignments, Due Dates, and Policies - General Description




Assignment Schedule:





No.	DUE DATE	Task	Resources
#1	Feb 26	Word Parsing	Laboratory 1 material is here.
#2	Mar 05	Word Tagging	Brill part of speech tagger; web version of Brill tagger here. Paper on Brill tagger here. Hmm tagger paper here.
#3	Mar 12	Phrase Parsing	deMarcken parser; documentation here
#4	Apr 02	Semantic Interpretation	Syntax-directed semantic interpretation system
#5	Apr 09	Probabilistic methods; IR	Probabilistic parsers and extensions of HMM, other association methods
#6	Apr 23	Enrichment  Report	Your own choice, an 'engineering evaluation' reporting on an extension to any of the labs/topics in the course
#7	May 14	Final Project	Your own design with team partners




Open to submissions

Closed to submissions




Assignment Specifics:


Laboratory 1 - Word parsing & morphology

        Laboratory 2 - Word tagging & comparing statistical models

        Laboratory 3 - Phrase structure parsing

       Tentative Course Schedule:

Week 1	INTRODUCTION: The NLP enterprise, from words to meaning	Reading in Textbook or Notes
W 02/05	Introduction, Organization, Laboratories. Course Overview: Intro to NLP. Main Issues; fsa's [pdf]  [4slides/page for printing] For fun, try this link: postmodern. Reference for this generation program is  here.	pp.1-57;  Notes 1
Week 2	WORD MODELING: automata and linguistics	pp. 58-90
M 02/10	Linguistics: Phonology and Morphology I.; 2-level morphology, Kimmo  [pdf]  [2slides/page for printing]  Lab 1 intro: processing words	Notes 2
W 02/12	Linguistics: Phonology and Morphology II.  [pdf]  [2slides/page for printing]  Lab 1b : processing  Spanish words	pp. 287-321
Week 3	WORD MODELING: statistical approaches & part of speech tagging
T 02/18	President's Day Class (MIT turns Tuesday into Monday) OOPS SNOW DAY!!	pp. 235-284
W 02/19	HMM Tagging; Statistical Transformation Rule-Based Tagging; Precision, Recall, Accuracy For fun (and learning) try this link to an online Brill tagger here. Note: Default tagging is for Swedish! Click 'English' and click tracing 'on' if you want to see how it works.
Week 4	LINGUISTICS & GRAMMARS; PARSING ALGORTHMS I	Notes 3
M 02/24	Part of Speech Tagging: the Brill Tagger. Lab 1 due; Lab 2 handed out.	pp. 357-394
W 02/26	Introduction to Parsing; Linguistics: Syntax & Parsing .
Week 5	PARSING ALGORITHMS II	Notes 4
M 03/03	Shift-Reduce Parsers in Detail. Earley's Algorithm and Chart Parsing
W 03/05	Context-free Parsing and Beyond: Efficiency Issues; Feature-based parsing; NL system design Lab 2 due.	pp. 477-498
F 03/07	Add Date
Week 6	PARSING ALGORITHMS and the LEXICON
M 03/10	Shift-Reduce Parsers in Detail. Earley's Algorithm and Chart Parsing  Lab 3 handed out
W 03/12	Parsing with an integrated lexicon - the question of syntactic features.
Week 7	SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION	pp. 395-446;pp. 447-476
M 03/17	Semantic Interpretation I: compositionality
W 03/19	Semantic Interpretation II: compositionality and quantifiers Lab 3 due, Lab 4 handed out.
3/24-3/28	No classes - Spring Break. Go to someplace warm if you can.
Week 8	FEATURE Parsing; TREE BANKS & PROBABILISTIC PARSING	Notes 5
M 03/31	Feature Grammars Probabilistic grammars.
W 04/02	PCFGs  continued. inside-outside algorithm. Lab 4 due (roughly!), Lab 5 handed out	pp. 501-544
Week 9	SEMANTICS II
M 04/07	Conclusions of Probabilistic methods.	pp. 545-588
W 04/09	Semantic Interpretation III:  Lab 5 due.
Week 10	WORDS & LEXICAL SEMANTICS, I	pp. 589-630
M 04/14	Lexical Semantics I
W 04/16	Determiners and Quantifiers
Week 11	WORDS & LEXICAL SEMANTICS, II
M 04/21	No class - Patriot's Day.  Run the Boston Marathon if you can.
W 04/23	Determiners & Quantifiers, II .   "Enrichment" Lab 6 due (on or before)	pp. 631-666
Th 04/24	Drop Date
Week 12	MACHINE TRANSLATION, I	Notes 6
M 04/28	Principle-based Parsing
W 04/30	Classical Models of Machine Translation: an Overview	pp. 799-830
Week 13	MACHINE TRANSLATION, II
M 05/05	Statistical Machine Translation (MT).Alignment and Parameter Estimation for MT,
W 05/07	Language learning I
Week 14	EVOLUTIONARY MODELS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING & ORIGINS	Notes 7
M 05/12	Language Learning II: Computational Models of Language Learning
W 05/14	Final project due.  Computational Models of Language Change and the Origins of Language

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Grading Weights:




Assignments	70%
Final Project	20%
Class Participation	10%