Detmar Meurers: Introduction to Computational Linguistics I
Winter 2003, LING684.01

• Course description and general information

• Syllabus with links to slides, exercises, and code appearing during the course:

  1. Mon, 6. Jan.: Organizational meeting (slides)
  2. Wed, 8. Jan.: Finite state machines and regular languages (slides, exercise sheet 1)
  3. Mon, 13. Jan.: Implementing finite state machines and learning Prolog along the way (slides, exercise sheet 2)
  4. Wed, 15. Jan.: continued

  Mon, 20. Jan.: Martin Luther King Day

  5. Wed, 22. Jan.: Towards more complex grammar formalisms: Basic formal language theory (slides)
  6. Mon, 27. Jan.: More on recursive relations in Prolog
  7. Wed, 29. Jan.: From context free grammars to definite clause grammars (slides, exercise sheet 3)
  8. Mon, 3. Feb.: What to encode in a grammar: A DCG for English (slides)
  9. Wed, 5. Feb.: How to process with a grammar: Intro to Parsing (slides)
     • Exercise sheet 4 (pdf, ex4.pl)
  10. Mon, 10. Feb.: Parsing strategies and their implementation (continues slides above)
  11. Wed, 12. Feb.: Remembering sub-results: Well-formed substring tables/CYK (slides, exercise sheet 5)

      Mon, 17. Feb.: Snow holiday

  12. Wed, 19. Feb.: Parsing strategies and CYK review implementation of CYK (continues slides above)
  13. Wed, 24. Feb.: Remembering subcomputations: The active chart/Earley (continues slides above)
  14. Wed, 26. Feb.: More complex data structures:
  From atomic symbols to first order terms to feature structures (slides, exercise sheet 6)
  15. Mon, 3. Mar.: Term and feature structure unification (continues slides above) and
      An introduction to the typed-feature based parsing system Trale (slides, description of final project)
  16. Wed, 5. Mar.: PATR-II and Parsing with complex categories (slides)
  17. Mon, 10. Mar.: Chart-Parsing with complex categories (slides)
  18. Wed, 12. Mar.:

• Code directory

• Lecture notes

  This course reader, which is intended as a basic guideline on the material covered in this course, is a modified version of the module workbook for ``Techniques in Natural Language Processing 1'' by Chris Mellish, Pete Whitelock and Graeme Ritchie, 1994, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. I would like to thank them for permitting me to adapt their material for this course.

• On-line reading material (accessible to course participants only)

  Thanks to Josh Rodriguez for providing these on-line versions!

• Links to manuals and related information

  • Ale Manual v.3.2.1
  • Trale Manual v.2.1.4 (Draft)
  • SWI Prolog Manual
  • SICStus Prolog Manual
  • Some on-line introductions to Prolog:
    • A very first introduction (by Tamsin Treasure-Jones, Paul Brna, and Mike Brayshaw)
    • An introductory course (by Paul Brna)
    • An Introduction to Logic Programing through Prolog (by Michael Spivey)

  • Help with the UNIX system:
    • UNIXhelp for Users (developed at the University of Edinburgh)