Natural Lang Processing

Catalog description

Survey of the techniques used for processing natural language. Syntactic analysis: major syntactic structures of English; alternative formalisms for natural language grammar; parsing algorithms; analyzing coordinate conjunction; parsing with graded acceptability. Semantic analysis: meaning representations; analysis of quantificational structure; semantic constraints; anaphora resolution; analysis of sentence fragments. Analysis of discourse and dialog. Text generation. Students get some experience using a natural language parser and a natural language query interface. Brief weekly written assignments and a term project involving a mixture of library research and programming (mostly in LISP).