CSC 2501 / 485 Fall 2000 - Course Information 
Links:
CSC485 / 2501 Home Page

 
Lecturer

 Suzanne Stevenson, D.L. Prat 290F, tel. (416) 978-6277, suzanne@cs.utoronto.ca
 

Office Hours

 For now, by appointement - just drop by (any day except Wednesday), or send email to arrange a time.
 

Teaching Assistant

 Diana Inkpen, dianaz@cs.utoronto.ca
 

Class Meetings

 The class will meet on Tuesday, 9--11, in RW 229 (Ramsey Wright Building), with tutorials on Thursday, 10--11, in RW229.
 There will be no tutorial or class on the following days: Thursday September 14 and Thursday December 7.
On some weeks, we may hold class during the tutorial hour and/or the tutorial during (one of) the class hours.
 

Computer Accounts

Accounts on the CDF teaching Suns will be allocated in the first week. NSERC-funded research machines (dvp, quw, allen and the Computer Science workstations) should not be used for coursework.
 

Evaluation

 Grades in the course are based on the project, which counts for 65% of your final grade, and two take-home problem sets, which count for 35%. 
 The problem sets cover mostly those parts of the course material that aren't involved in the project.
 Students whose main area of study is not computer science or cognitive science (e.g., those taking this course as part of a linguistics program) may write a term paper instead of doing the project.  See the instructor for details.
 

Other CL Courses

 CSC401/2511S, Natural Language Computing, will be offered in the winter.  This is a lecture-style course that presents statistical and empirical approaches  to natural language applications.
 CSC2528, Topics in Computational Linguistics, will also be offered in the winter.  This is a seminar-style course emphasizing issues and current research in the area.

Lectures Schedule
Week Topic
12 Sept  Introduction to CL. Introduction to grammar
19 Sept  * Context-free parsing as search.  Efficient parsing.
26 Sept  Parsing with features.
03 Oct   * Parsing in Prolog with DCGs (Definite Clause Grammars).
10 Oct Ambiguity resolution.  Modelling human parsing.
17 Oct   * Statistical parsers.
24 Oct Ambiguity resolution.  Modelling human parsing.
31 Oct   * Semantic representation.  Predicate/argument structure.
07 Nov  Unification and semantics processing.
14 Nov Statistical approaches to selectional restrictions.
21 Nov    Discourse structure and anaphora resolution.
28 Nov   * Machine translation and machine-assisted translation.
05 Dec   * Automatic acquisition of lexical knowledge.

 Note:  The schedule of topics is approximate; exactly what we do and how long it takes will depend on the interests and needs of the class.  However, the schedule of due dates is exact.

 Weeks marked with a `*' indicate weeks that something is due; see precise due dates for Project and Problem Sets.
 

Reading List

 Textbooks

 JURAFSKY, Daniel and MARTIN, James H. Speech and language processing. 1999.
 Homepage of the book.
 Erata page maintained by the authors.

 Strongly Recommended

 ALLEN, James, Natural language understanding (second edition). Benjamin Cummings, 1994.

 WARDHAUGH, Ronald. Understanding English grammar: A linguistic approach. Blackwell, 1995
-- A good reference on the grammar of English, to answer the question "What is the correct thing for the parser to do with this sentence?"