Our Courses

CSC401H (undergraduate) and CSC2511H (graduate)
Natural Language Computing     26L, 13T (Winter)
Instructor: Gerald Penn
   An introduction to techniques involving natural language and speech in applications such as information retrieval, extraction, and filtering; intelligent Web searching; spelling and grammar checking; speech recognition and synthesis; automatic text summarization; pseudo-understanding and generation of natural language; and multi-lingual systems including machine translation. Methods covered will include N-grams, POS-tagging, semantic distance metrics, indexing, on-line lexicons and thesauri, morphological analysis and parsing, text markup languages and document structure, corpora and collections of on-line documents, corpus analyses. Software tools employed will include Perl.
Prerequisites: CSC228, STA220/250/257; CSC340 is recommended.
Note: CSC485/2501 and CSC401/2511 may be taken in either order.
 

CSC485H (undergraduate) and CSC2501H (graduate)
Computational Linguistics     26L, 13T (Fall)
Instructor: Graeme Hirst
   Computational linguistics and the understanding and generation of natural language by computer. Syntactic processing. Semantics and semantic interpretation. Pragmatics, pronouns, definite descriptions, discourse context. Machine translation.
Prerequisite: CSC324H or experience in Lisp or Prolog.
Note: CSC485/2501 and CSC401/2511 may be taken in either order.
Recommended preparation: Students are urged to consult the instructor before enrolling. Suggested background includes substantial computing experience and a course in AI, such as CSC384H, or some aspect of linguistics. Students in linguistics programs should consult the instructor.
 

CSC2517H (graduate)
Discrete Mathematical Models of Sentence Structure     26L (Not offered every year)
Instructor: Gerald Penn
   Typed feature logic; mildly context-sensitive languages; parallel context-free grammars; tree-adjoining grammars; combinatory categorial grammar; pre-group grammars; tree transducers and tree-walking transducers.
 

CSC2519H (graduate)
Natural Language Semantics     26L (Fall 2007)
Instructor: Gerald Penn
   An introduction to the study of meaning, its formal representation, its derivation from natural language syntactic structures, and its combination through inference with knowledge about the world. Topics may include: introduction to philosophy of language, compositionality, categorial grammar, quantification and plurality, underspecification, lexical semantics, word-sense disambiguation, lexical choice and nuances of meaning, calculating semantic distance, semantic interpretation in natural language processing systems, and reasoning with the event calculus in natural language.
 

CSC2520H (graduate)
The Computational Lexicon     26L (Not offered every year)
Instructor: Suzanne Stevenson
   A computational lexicon is a highly structured repository of the rich syntactic and semantic knowledge about individual words in a natural language processing system. Two key issues will be the focus of this seminar course: the representation of lexical information, and its automatic acquisition. Topics will include: the organization of meaning and syntax in the lexicon; the interface between lexical semantics and its syntactic realization; the predicate argument structure of verbs; corpus-based approaches to automatic lexical acquisition and semantic/syntactic annotation of words; linking of statistical models to linguistic models of lexical properties; unsupervised learning of lexical relations; resolution of lexical ambiguities in natural language processing. Research papers will primarily focus on relevant research in computational linguistics, but we will also discuss work in linguistic and cognitive models of the human lexicon, and ways in which the engineering and cognitive approaches can inform each other.
 

CSC2540H (graduate)
Cognitive Linguistics     26L (Not offered every year)
Instructor: Suzanne Stevenson
 

CSC2528H (graduate)
Advanced Computational Linguistics (Not offered every year)
Instructor: Graeme Hirst
   A seminar-style course that continues CSC 485/2501, and assumes the material presented therein. The course takes several topics of current research interest in computational linguistics, and studies them in depth. It emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of computational linguistics. The interests of the class will determine exactly which topics are chosen. Auditors are welcome.
Prerequisite: CSC 401/2511 or 485/2501 or permission of instructor.