Natural Language Processing

Computer Science 333

Fall, 2011

Instructor: John L. Donaldson
Meeting time: MWF 11:00-11:50 pm, King 221
Office: King 223C
Office hours: M 1:30-3:30, W 2:30-3:30, F 1:30-3:30 (or by appointment)

Course Information

Prerequisite: CS 151 (or consent of instructor)
Text: Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing, second edition, Prentice Hall, 2009.
Course Objectives:

Learn the basic concepts and theory of natural language processing; i.e., processing human language with a computer.
Learn about the areas in which natural language processing is being applied to problems today.
Learn to use tools and develop software systems to process natural language.

Grading Procedures

Your grade will be based on homework, a project, and two exams.

Point breakdown (approximate):
Homework	100-200
Project	100
Midterm Exam (October 21)	100
Final Exam (December 17 - 9 am)	150
Total	450-550

Policies

Please hand in assignments on time and working. Late assignments will be assessed a penalty of up to 10% per day.

All late assignments must be submitted by the end of the reading period.

Regular class attendance and participation is expected of everyone in the class.

You may work on the programming projects individually or in pairs. If you work with a partner, your pair should submit one solution for each project.

The Honor Code

The Honor Code has a straightforward application to this class. On all of the exams you are responsible for your own work; you may neither give nor receive aid during the course of the exam. If someone takes an exam at a different time than the rest of the class there may be no communication concerning the exam between that person and anyone else in the class, not even about whether the exam was easy or difficult. The atmosphere is somewhat more relaxed for the homework and programming assignments. You may discuss the problems with anyone else in the class, but you may not share your code with anyone (other than your partner on the programming projects). You must design and write your own solutions.