Statistical Natural Language Processing

Course aim

To introduce the basics of statistical natural language processing (NLP) including both linguistics concepts such as morphology and syntax and machine learning techniques relevant for NLP.

Course content

NLP is domain-centred fields, as opposed to technique centred fields such as ML, and as such there is no "theory of NLP" which can be taught in a cumulative technique-centred way. Instead this course will focus on one or two NLP end-to-end "pipelines" (such as Machine Translation and Machine Reading). Through these applications the participants will learn about language itself, relevant linguistic concepts, and Machine Learning techniques. For the latter an emphasis will be on structured prediction, a branch of ML that is particularly relevant to NLP.

Topics will include (but are not restricted to) machine translation, sequence tagging, constituent and dependency parsing, information extraction, semantics.

The course has a strong applied character, with coursework to be programmed, and lab classes to teach students to write software that processes language.

Indicative contents:

Introduction
Machine Translation 1
Machine Translation 2
Document Classification and Clustering
Tagging
Syntactic Parsing 1
Syntactic Parsing 2
Coreference
Information Extraction
Semantic Parsing

Textbook(s)

Nil

Prerequisite(s)

Nil

Corequisite(s)

Nil

Teaching method

Note: These components may or may not be scheduled in every study period. Please refer to the timetable for further details.

Assessment

Continuous assessment

Fees

EFTSL*: 0.125
Commonwealth Supported program (Band 2)
To determine the fee for this course as part of a Commonwealth Supported program, go to:
How to determine your Commonwealth Supported course fee. (Opens new window)

Fee-paying program for domestic and international students
International students and students undertaking this course as part of a postgraduate fee paying program must refer to the relevant program home page to determine the cost for undertaking this course.

Non-award enrolment
Non-award tuition fees are set by the university. To determine the cost of this course, go to:
How to determine the relevant non award tuition fee. (Opens new window)

Not all courses are available on all of the above bases, and students must check to ensure that they are permitted to enrol in a particular course.

* Equivalent Full Time Study Load. Please note: all EFTSL values are published and calculated at ten decimal places. Values are displayed to three decimal places for ease of interpretation.