Course Web Pages

Note: as most of you know, the Wednesday lecture on 13th January had to be cancelled because there was no electricity to run the overhead projector. This has meant in turn that the lab classes this Friday cannot run because they depend crucially on the material that would have been covered in the lecture. This means that I am going to have to move most things back a week.

This course introduces techniques and concepts involved in analysing and generating human languages by machine, as well as various practical applications to which this technology is nowadays being harnessed. Topics covered on the course will include both fundamental representational issues and processing techniques (e.g., finite state methods, statistical methods, lexical representation, grammars and parsing) as well as problems and application areas (e.g., corpus-based resources and processing, machine translation, text generation, database interfaces).

The course assumes a familiarity with basic computing concepts, some knowledge of Unix, and the ability to program in at least one high-level language (e.g., Prolog). Prior knowledge of linguistics is not required, though some understanding of the rudiments of English grammar will come in handy.