Natural Language Processing I

CSCI 657/490-B8

Spring 2025

Last updated Sun. 3/9/2025

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Course Information

• Syllabus
• Departmental academic integrity policy

Outline of Blackboard files

Future material is provided for your convenience. Details may change until the week we get to each section.

Python Resources

Python style guides

• Simplified Python style guide
• PEP 8 Python style guide

Python reference

• Python official web site
• Python package repository Google is sometimes more useful.
• Python documentation for version 3.9.2 (inc. tutorial and HOWTOs)

Introductory Python

• Python for Everybody Absolute beginners should go through chapter 7.
• Bernd Klein's Python course

NLP Resources

Textbooks

• Jurafsky and Martin textbook web site (3rd edition draft)

Papers

• ACL Anthology: Digital Archive of Research Papers in Computational Linguistics

Statistics

• Choosing the correct statistical test (UCLA)

NLP Software

NLTK

• NLTK website
• Book

Java software

• LingPipe: Java Libraries for NLP

Linguistics

• Ethnologue: Languages of the World

Artificial Intelligence

• AI Topics (from AAAI)

Programming Resources

Unicode

• Unicode general category values

Unix information

• MobaXterm
• Important Unix commands
• Most common Emacs commands

Old notes

What makes NLP hard

• Language variation: Language Files 10.10
• Surface form vs. meaning (the duck sentences)
• Types of ambiguities
• Even knowing what's a word is hard
• More types of ambiguity
• Humans have problems too: Garden path sentences

Morphology

• English morphology
• Evidence for human two-level processing
• Stemming without a lexicon (Porter)

Spelling correction

• Kernighan's COLING '90 paper
• Bayes' theorem for ASR

Discourse

• Pragmatics: Intention vs. form

Preliminary form

• CFGs
• Greenberg's universals
• Language change over time
• Meaning