LIN 3106: Computational Linguistics

Course Description:

This course introduces students to computational linguistics and the application of computers to linguistic analysis and model-building. Topics to be covered will include: computer fundamentals, elementary prologue, natural language processing, text and dictionary analysis, language and cognition from a computational perspective.

Course objectives:

This course aims at:

1.Equipping students with skills of using computers to analyse language.

2.Enable students to design computer programmes.

Course Outline:

•Introduction

Definition of terms

Formal/Artificial Vs natural language

Natural language processing

Language technology

Useful computer programmes

Linguistics and computational linguistics

Methods in computational linguistics

•Regular expression and formal language

Definition

Web search for Regex

Basic search patterns and operations.

Disjunction

The Pipe

Negation

Kleen Star

Anchors etc

The greed of Regex

Interface: Regex and FL

•Finite State automation (FSA) and Finite state transducers FST)

Definition of temrs Nodes, arcs, loops, state, tape etc

Transition tables

Determinism of FSA and FST

•Finite state Morphology

Basics on morphology

Morphological parsing

The lexicon

Morphological recognition

Application: FST

•Computational Semantics

Representing meaning

First order predicate calculus ( FOPC)

FOPC predictes

FOPC quantifiers and their scope

FOPC logical operators

Truth tables

Semantic analysis and augmentation

•Feature Unification

Feature structure

DAG and AVM

Unification and merge principles.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

  1. Analyse language using computer.
  2. Design a simple computer programme for language analysis
  3. Be able to distinguish between human capacity and ability from machine /computer capacity and ability.

Mode Delivery

-Lectures

-Group discussions

-practical exercises.

Mode of assessment:

-Course work- 30%

-Final Examination- 70%

References:

Allen, James (1995). Natural language Understanding. Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummungs ( 2nd edn)

Grishman, Ralph. (1986). Computational Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Studies in natural languages Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

King, Margret ed. (1983). Parsing Natural language. London: Academic Press/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Klatt, Dennis. (1987). “Review of text –to –speech conversation for English. “ Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 82:3

Leech, Geoffrey and Fligelstone, Steven. (1992). “ Computers and Corpus analysis” In C. Butler, Computers and Written Texts. Oxford : Blackwell.

Levinson, Stephen E. and Liberman, Mark Y. (1981). Speech recognition by Computer. “ Scientific American 224(40 56-77.

Pullman, Steve (1997). Computational Linguistics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.