ling 4424 cogst4240 cs3740 Computational Linguistics Fall 2009

Can computers use grammars to understand natural language? Yes.

• wield the awesome Objective CaML programming language
• analyze word structure with finite automata
• instruct the computer to search for sentence structure
• use logic to stand in for meaning
• locate human languages in the space of formal languages

The schedule of topics outlines the topics and links various resources. The course notes supplement the lectures. A book can help ease the transition to ocaml. Students' grades reflect several factors. The class meets Monday, Wednesday & Friday in Snee Hall room 1120 from 1:25pm until 2:15pm. I have scheduled office hours on Tuesday afternoons at 3pm, but if those don't work, feel free to make an appointment.

• Handout on Lexical Gaps from O'Grady textbook
• a handy Talking IPA chart
• a hint about kstar
• Peter Norvig on memoization (warning: Lisp)
  • the Field and Harrison chapter that Norvig refers to
• Andrew Appel explains continuation-passing style in two-and-a-half pages
• Mark Johnson applies continuation-passing style to parsing (warning: Scheme)
• Chris Barker applies continuation-passing style to quantification in natural language (warning: λ calculus)
• Chapter 11 on CYK from Mellish, Whitelock and Ritchie (1994) cf. MIT-LCS-TR-261.ps.gz pp 8-10
• Martin Kay on unification (warning: Prolog, 15 pages)
• Stuart Shieber on unification (8 pages)
• Kevin Knight's multidisciplinary survey of unification (especially sections 7 and 8, pp 105-113
• Baader and Nipkow (1998) explain how to implement term unification
• Frost and Launchbury (1989) apply meaning as reference
• Jan van Eijck and Christina Unger's forthcoming book, Computational Semantics with Functional Programming (warning: Haskell)
• Stuart Shieber again on whether human languages are context-free
• Kroch and Joshi on The Linguistic Relevance of Tree-Adjoining Grammar
• Bob Frank's book on Phrase structure composition and syntactic dependencies
• Ed Stabler on Derivational Minimalism and head-movement.
• Greg Kobele's directly compositional semantics for MGs (chapter 2)
• Joshi, Vijay-Shanker and Weir on The Convergence of Mildly Context-Sensitive Formalisms