Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

3 Units

This course gives students an overview of the stat of the art in natural language processing. We will discuss computational aspects of language modeling through probabilistic models, computational approaches to syntax (parsing) and semantic representations, discourse and dialog. We will study the applications of these techniques to a variety of problems including information extraction, translation and summarization. At the end of the course a student should be able to (i) understand the various statistical models and algorithms for NLP (ii) modify them as needed or design novel approaches for specific NLP tasks and (iii) understand how to evaluate the performance of these models and compare them to alternatives. Prereq: CSDS 340 or Requisites Not Met permission.