SFU                       Computing Science                       05-1
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CMPT 413-3 D1"    Computational Linguistics
 Instructor: A. Sarkar                     SFU Burnaby

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OBJECTIVE/DESCRIPTION:

Computational Linguistics is the study of human language from a
computational perspective.  This course will examine algorithms used in the
automatic analysis or production of language.  Along with formal models of
language, we will also study the engineering of natural language processing
software.  Many of the concepts, methods and algorithms studied are related
to topics like formal linguistics, information retrieval, data mining from
text, and biological sequence analysis.

TOPICS:

   o Introduction to linguistics and formal language theory
   o Finite-state transducers:  applications to phonology and morphology
   o Machine translation
   o Hidden markov models:  speech recognition, part of speech tagging
   o Context-free grammars:  Semantics
   o Language and complexity:  the Chomsky hierarchy
   o Feature structures and unification
   o Generation
   o Word-sense disambiguation
   o Wordnet
   o Discourse and dialog models
   o Summarization
   o Document classification and clustering

GRADING:

Assignments (40%), Midterm (20%), Final Examination (40%).

Students must attain an overall passing grade on the weighted average of
exams in the course in order to obtain a clear pass (C or better).

TEXTBOOKS:

   o None

RECOMMENDED:

   o Speech and Language Processing, Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin,
     Prentice-Hall, 2000
   o Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Christopher
     Manning and Hinrich Schutze, MIT Press, 1999

PREREQUISITES/COREQUISITES:

Completion of nine credits in Computing Science upper division courses, or
permission of the instructor.

Distributed:  November 1, 2004

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