Introduction to the course Day 1 LING 681.02 Computational Linguistics Harry Howard Tulane University.

Introduction to the course

Day 1

LING 681.02Computational Linguistics

Harry HowardTulane University

24-Aug-2009 LING 681.02, Prof. Howard, Tulane University

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Objectives

This course shows you how to make a computer perform various useful tasks with natural language.

Through it you'll learn some linguistics, some algorithms, some statistics,and some computer programming in Python.

I do not require that you know anything in particular about these areas beforehand.


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Objectives, cont.

Hopefully you'll finish the semester with an appreciation for the intricacies of modeling human languages,

plus some practical knowledge about solving linguistic problems, such as techniques for filtering junk email, automatically discovering different meanings of the word "run", efficiently encoding spelling rules, tagging words according to their part of speech, parsing English sentences, and automatically translating from one language to another, among other things.


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Objectives, cont.

Our work will be a combination of learning new algorithms, discussing linguistics, and programming useful systems that operate on real data.

It is great training if you are interested in doing natural language processing work in industry, either in a research lab or in a startup.


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Why should you care?

TrendsAn enormous amount of information is now

available in machine readable form as natural language text.

Conversational agents (automated voices that answer the phone) are becoming an important form of human-computer communication.

Much of human-human communication is now mediated by computers.


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Powerset

Commercial worldLots of exciting stuff is going on…


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Google Translate


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Google Translate


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Web Q/A


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Weblog analytics

Data-mining of Weblogs, discussion forums, message boards, user groups, and other forms of user generated mediaProduct marketing informationPolitical opinion trackingSocial network analysisBuzz analysis (what’s hot, what topics are

people talking about right now).


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Web analytics


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Intended audience

Students of linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, mathematics, and any other discipline with an interest in how

to process natural language by computer.


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Outcomes For you to demonstrate how well you have attained the objectives, you

will perform the following tasks: Take a quiz or turn in a project almost every week, usually on

Monday. [11-1 * 7.5% = 75%] No quiz/project can be accepted late. Even though these look like a lot of small grades, missing just one

lowers your final grade almost an entire letter, as an unfortunate few of my students have found out the hard way.

If you know ahead of time that you will miss a quiz/project, send me an e-mail beforehand, and I will excuse you with no penalty.

Present a final project to the class on the final exam day (Dec 14) and turn in a report of your project within two days. [25%]

This may be a group effort, but the entire group will receive the same grade.


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Participation

Note that there is no credit for class participation,

but I will change any high Y- into a low X+ if I notice you participating in class.


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Prerequisites

There aren't any.I do not take anything for granted and so

will explain all background information, or at least suggest sources where you can find it on your own.


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Code of academic integrity

“The integrity of Newcomb-Tulane College is based on the absolute honesty of the entire community in all academic endeavors. As part of the Tulane University community, students have certain responsibilities regarding work that forms the basis for the evaluation of their academic achievement. Students are expected to be familiar with these responsibilities at all times. No member of the university community should tolerate any form of academic dishonesty, because the scholarly community of the university depends on the willingness of both instructors and students to uphold the Code of Academic Conduct. When a violation of the Code of Academic Conduct is observed it is the duty of every member of the academic community who has evidence of the violation to take action. Students should take steps to uphold the code by reporting any suspected offense to the instructor or the associate dean of the college. Students should under no circumstances tolerate any form of academic dishonesty.” For further information, point your browser at http://college.tulane.edu/code.htm.


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Students with disabilities

Students with disabilities who need academic accommodation should:Contact and register with the Office of Disability

Services (ODS). For more information, visit the ODS website at http://www.erc.tulane.edu/studentindex.html.

Bring official notice to me from the ODS indicating that you need academic accommodation. This should be done within the first week of class.

http://www.erc.tulane.edu/studentindex.html


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Electronic communications

http://www.tulane.edu/~ling/NLP/I will send you e-mail on a regular basis – you

must check your e-mail on a regular basis!If you want to use a non-Tulane address, e-mail me a

message to that effect from the address.I will record and podcast every class.

The mp3 files will be available on the course website above.

I will post my PowerPoint presentation to the course website after every class.


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The textbooks

Speech and Language Processing, 2e, (2008) by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin [SLP]

Natural Language Processing with Python, 1e, (2009) by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper [NLPP] Free at http://www.nltk.org/book


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Natural Language Toolkit

The choice of Python as programming language for the course was motivated by the availability of the excellent tools in the Natural Language Toolkit (http://www.nltk.org/), which are programmed in Python.

As well as the just-published textbook that goes with it.

The authors of the NLTK choose Python, in turn, for the ease with which it lets you create NLP applications.


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Python for beginners 1

Python for Software Design: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. $39 Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Free from:

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html


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Python for beginners, cont.

3e, $35.4e released Oct 2


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Python for those who know another language

http://software-carpentry.org/Everyone should read "Introduction".


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If you really want to use Perl (and Prolog)

An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog: An Outline of Theories, Implementation, and Application with Special Consideration of English, French, and German (2006) by Pierre Nugues

Free from library through SpringerLink: http://www.springerlink.com.libproxy.tulane.edu:2048/content/m34655/?p=0440574d897b4a709b8cb0af2352f96a&pi=0

But see NLPP Preface.


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Schedule of readingsand class preparation

You should come to class having completed the assignment for that day listed in the schedule.

We will spend the class going over the exercises in the assignment, answering questions that may have come up in the readings, and perhaps doing new exercises.

We will cover about 15 pages a day in SLP, plus a varying number of exercises.

This could take a considerable amount of time.


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Computers

If you have a laptop, you will probably want to bring it to class.


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Final exam day (Mon, Dec 14)

There is no final exam, but you must present your final project to the class on the final exam day.

You CANNOT leave town before then!Tell your parents NOW! You are hereby warned. Do not tell me at the end of the semester that your

parents bought you a ticket home without knowing.


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Aesthetics

I know my slides are ugly and boring, but that is so that they print accurately.

They only use two fonts, Arial Bold and Times New Roman.


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Contact

Prof. Harry Howardhoward at tulane dot edu 862-3417 (voice mail 24 hours a day)Newcomb Hall 322-D Office hours: T 3-5, W 4-5 and

by appointment (the link goes to my home page, which displays my Google calendar)

http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/


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Questions?

?


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What is the name of this course?

Speech & Language Processing

§1. Introduction


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Psychology

It should be noted that much recent research uses psychologically and even neurologically plausible algorithms for learning patterns from natural language texts,

so that we will emphasize the acquisition of linguistic knowledge, temporal processing, and the relation between perception and grammar/vocabulary.


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Natural Language Processing

We’re going to study what goes into getting computers to perform useful and interesting tasks involving human languages.

We are also concerned with the insights that such computational work gives us into human processing of language.


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Major topics of book

I. Words: §2-6

II. Speech: §7-11

III. Syntax: §12-16

IV. Meaning: §17-20

V. Discourse: §21

VI. Applications exploiting each: §22-25


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Applications

First, what makes an application a language processing application (as opposed to any other piece of software)?

An application that requires the use of knowledge about human languageExample: Is Unix wc (word count) an

example of a language processing application?


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Applications

Word count?When it counts words: Yes

To count words you need to know what a word is. That’s knowledge of language.

When it counts lines and bytes: NoLines and bytes are computer artifacts, not

linguistic entities


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Big applications

Question answeringConversational agentsSummarizationMachine translation


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Big applications

These kinds of applications require a tremendous amount of knowledge of language.

Consider the interaction with HAL the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, on the next slide.


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HAL from 2001

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do

that.


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What’s needed?

Speech recognition and synthesisKnowledge of the English words spoken

What they meanHow groups of words clump

What the clumps meanDialog

It is polite to respond, even if you’re planning to kill someone.

It is polite to pretend to want to be cooperative (I’m afraid, I can’t…)


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Caveat

NLP has an AI aspect to it.We often deal with ill-defined problems.We don’t often come up with exact

solutions/algorithms.We can’t let either of those facts get in the way

of making progress.


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Course material

We’ll be intermingling discussions of:Linguistic topics

E.g. Morphology, syntax, discourse structure

Formal systemsE.g. Regular languages, context-free grammars

ApplicationsE.g. Machine translation, information extraction


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Topics: Linguistics

Word-level processingSyntactic processingLexical and compositional semanticsDiscourse processingDialogue structure


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Topics: Techniques

Finite-state methodsContext-free methodsAugmented grammars

UnificationLambda calculus

First order logic

Probability modelsSupervised machine

learning methods


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Topics: Applications

Small Spelling correction Hyphenation

Medium Word-sense disambiguation Named entity recognition Information retrieval

Large Question answering Conversational agents Machine translation

Stand-alone

Enabling applications

Funding/Business plans


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Categories of knowledge

PhonologyMorphologySyntaxSemanticsPragmaticsDiscourse

Each kind of knowledge has associated with it an encapsulated set of processes that make use of it.

Interfaces are defined that allow the various levels to communicate.

This usually leads to a pipeline architecture.


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Ambiguity

Computational linguists are obsessed with ambiguity

Ambiguity is a fundamental problem of computational linguistics

Resolving ambiguity is a crucial goal


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Ambiguity

Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:I made her duck


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Ambiguity

Find at least 5 meanings of this sentence:I made her duck

I cooked waterfowl for her benefit (to eat)I cooked waterfowl belonging to herI created the (plaster?) duck she ownsI caused her to quickly lower her head or bodyI waved my magic wand and turned her into

undifferentiated waterfowl


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Ambiguity is pervasive

I caused her to quickly lower her head or bodyLexical category: “duck” can be a N or V

I cooked waterfowl belonging to her.Lexical category: “her” can be a possessive (“of

her”) or dative (“for her”) pronounI made the (plaster) duck statue she owns

Lexical Semantics: “make” can mean “create” or “cook”


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Grammar: Make can be:Transitive: (verb has a noun direct object)

I cooked [waterfowl belonging to her]Ditransitive: (verb has 2 noun objects)

I made [her] (into) [undifferentiated waterfowl]Action-transitive (verb has a direct object and

another verb) I caused [her] [to move her body]


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Phonetics! I mate or duck I’m eight or duck Eye maid; her duck Aye mate, her duck I maid her duck I’m aid her duck I mate her duck I’m ate her duck I’m ate or duck I mate or duck


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Dealing with ambiguity

Four possible approaches:1. Tightly coupled interaction among

processing levels; knowledge from other levels can help decide among choices at ambiguous levels.

2. Pipeline processing that ignores ambiguity as it occurs and hopes that other levels can eliminate incorrect structures.


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Dealing with ambiguity3. Probabilistic approaches based on making the

most likely choices

4. Don’t do anything, maybe it won’t matter1. We’ll leave when the duck is ready to eat.

2. The duck is ready to eat now.Does the “duck” ambiguity matter with respect to whether we

can leave?


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Models and algorithms

By models we mean the formalisms that are used to capture the various kinds of linguistic knowledge we need.

Algorithms are then used to manipulate the knowledge representations needed to tackle the task at hand.


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Models

State machinesRule-based approachesLogical formalismsProbabilistic models


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Algorithms

Many of the algorithms that we’ll study will turn out to be transducers; algorithms that take one kind of structure as input and output another.

Unfortunately, ambiguity makes this process difficult. This leads us to employ algorithms that are designed to handle ambiguity of various kinds


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Paradigms

In particular..State-space search

To manage the problem of making choices during processing when we lack the information needed to make the right choice

Dynamic programmingTo avoid having to redo work during the course of a state-

space searchCKY, Earley, Minimum Edit Distance, Viterbi, Baum-Welch

ClassifiersMachine learning based classifiers that are trained to make

decisions based on features extracted from the local context


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State space search

States represent pairings of partially processed inputs with partially constructed representations.

Goals are inputs paired with completed representations that satisfy some criteria.

As with most interesting problems the spaces are normally too large to exhaustively explore.We need heuristics to guide the searchCriteria to trim the space


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Dynamic programming

Don’t do the same work over and over.Avoid this by building and making use of

solutions to sub-problems that must be invariant across all parts of the space.

Next time

Download and install Python and NLTKSee info at http://www.nltk.org/ > Download

SLP 2.1 & Ex 2.1-.2;

NLPP 1.1-.2 & Ex 1.8.1-.5

Introduction to the course Day 1 LING 681.02 Computational Linguistics Harry Howard Tulane University.

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