Introduction to Computer Linguistics
Code
711131047
Academic unit
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Department
Linguística
Credits
6
Weekly hours
4
Teaching language
Portuguese
Objectives
Acquisition of knowledge in the field of Computer Linguistics that allows students:
a) to develop basic skills for the analysis and understanding of natural languages and of natural languages functioning aiming at computation;
b) to understand the levels of computer-aided treatment involved in the processing and computation of natural languages;
c) to know the different current strategies and tools for the processing and computation of natural languages;
d) to acquire methodologies for the computer-aided analysis and treatment of linguistic data;
e) to make use, in practical scenarios, of the acquired knowledge.
Prerequisites
None.
Subject matter
1. Linguistics, computation and natural language processing
2. Historical introduction to Computational Linguistics
2.1 Structuralist approach and Chomsky
2.2 Context-free grammars and transformational grammars
2.3 Valencies, interpretation and constraints
2.4 HPSG and unification
2.5 Meaning - text/Text - meaning theory
2.6 Corpus Linguistics
2.7 Automatic acquisition
3. Products, tools and areas from Computer Linguistics
3.1 Shallow processing (word delimitation, hyphenation, lemmatization, spell checking, PoS tagging)
3.2 Grammar and style checking
3.3 Information retrieval and summarization
3.4 Automatic translation
3.5 Natural language interface
3.6 Natural language recognition and generation
3.7 Language understanding
Bibliography
Allen, J., 1995. Natural Language Understanding, Menlo Park, CA: Benjamim Cummings.
Baldwin, T., 2005. General-Purpose Lexical Acquisition: Procedures, Questions and Results, in Proc. of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics 2005, Tokyo, Japan.
Bolshakov, I. & A. Gelbukh, 2004. Computational Linguistics: Models, Resources, Applications, México: IPN, UNAM, FCE.
Branco, A., S. Mendes & R. Ribeiro (eds.), 2004. Language Technology for Portuguese: shallow processing tools and resources, Lisboa: Edições Colibri.
Manning & Schütze, 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, MIT Press.
Mitrov, R., 2003. The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sag & Wasow, 1999. Syntactic Theory - A Formal Introduction, Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Svartvik, J. (ed.), 1992. Directions in Corpus Linguistics (Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Teaching method
Theoretical and practical classes and tutorial guidance, with resource to case studies and practical application of the acquired knowledge, including: i) topic presentation and explanation by the teacher; ii) discussion and analytic analysis of relevant literature on the addressed topics; iii) practical application of acquired knowledge in individual and collective essays within specific tasks.
Evaluation method
Continuous evaluation, including the following components: individual and collective essays, with presentation and discussion in class (accounting for 55% of the final grade); and final individual test (accounting for 45% of the final grade).