Advanced Computational Linguistics

This course is an introduction to computational linguistics, the study of natural language from a computational perspective. Computational linguistics encompasses both applied (engineering) and theoretical (cognitive) issues, and in this course you will be introduced to both. You will learn how to write programs to automatically process and analyze linguistic structure in language corpora. You will learn how formal language models (grammars) can be implemented computationally and used to represent linguistic structure at various levels. You will use these formal language models to automatically analyze (assign structure to) linguistic data and to model linguistic knowledge, and you will see how these models can be trained using language corpora. A major focus of the course will be on statistical techniques, especially Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood learning.