32406 Human Languages Technologies

The general objective of this course is to become acquainted with new technologies applied to natural languages such as English, Spanish, or Basque.

Activities

The total time assigned to this course is 90 hours (4,5 cr.) in 15 weeks. This time will be split into the following activities:

Lectures (15 hours)
Internet browsing and information retrieval (20 hours)
Testing of different language technology applications (20 hours)
Writting up of wikis and weblogs (35 hours)

Schedule

day

time

room

subject

week 1

We 11/2

12.30-13.45

B-16

Introduction to the course: schedule, evaluation, etc.

week 2

2.
3.

Mo 16/2
We 19/2

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Groups. Introduction to Human Language Technologies
Rieviewing the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

week 3

4.
5.

Mo 23/2
We 25/2

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.00

B-16
B-16

Editing with wikies. Rieviewing the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

week 4

6.
7.

Mo 1/3
We 3/3

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Editing with wikies. Lists of contents.
See also: Language Technology World

week 5

8.
9.

Mo 8/3
We 10/3

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Editing with wikies. Lists of contents.
See also: Elsnet.

week 6

10.
11.

Mo 15/3
We 17/3

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16

Review of ongoing preparation of materials.
See also: ACL.

week 7

12.
13.

Mo 21/3
We 24/3

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Review of ongoing preparation of materials.
See also: HLT03, HLT04.

week 8

14.
15.

Mo 29/3
We 31/3

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Review of ongoing preparation of materials.
See also: SEPLN.

week 9

16.

Mo 5/4

12.30-13.45

B-16

Review of ongoing preparation of materials.
See also: DELi, IXA.

week 10

17.
18.

Mo 19/4
We 21/4

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Transfering the contents to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
See also: LRC.

week 11

19.

We 28/4

12.30-13.45

B-16

Transfering the contents to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

week 12

20.
21.

Mo 3/5
We 5/5

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Transfering the contents to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

week 13

22.
23.

Mo 3/5
We 5/5

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

Presentations of groups	1	2	3
		4	5

week 14

24.
25.

Mo 17/5
We 19/5

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.00

B-16
B-16

Presentations of groups	6	7
	8	9	10

week 15

26.
27.

Mo 24/5
We 26/5

12.30-13.45
12.30-13.45

B-16
B-16

A talk by Pablo Garaizar (Txipi): Open Source, GNU, eGhost, and the Humanities.
Final review and comments

Final grades

Objetives

Become acquaintance with new technologies applied to natural languages in general and to English in particular.
Learn the contribution of linguistics to the development of information technologies.
Develop skills with Internet browsers to access and select relevant information.
Use text and hypertext processors for organising retrieved information and to writting up reports.
Review the main techniques and resources developed in computational linguistics.
Focus on practical applications of theoretical and of computational linguistics. We will consider applications such as information extraction, natural language interfaces, multilingual electronic publishing, machine translation, digital document localization, and the multilingual Internet.
Experiment with on-line translation programs and information search enginees.

Methodology

Students will work on basic reference material (list of contents), such as the articles available on Wikipedia, and will develop their own notes covering the main topics of the subject Human Language Technology. Students will use the Zwiki collaborative editing tool to prepare their materials. Then they will transfer their major contributions to the Wikipedia, in any of the languages they have been working on. Finally, they will have to present their works to the rest of the class.

Evaluation

In addition to regular attendance and participation, students will work on collaborative site dedicated to reviewing the main topics of the course. Grading in this course will depend on class attendance and participation (10%), group ellaboration of wikis (20%), personal ellaboration of wiki (40%), and the weblog (30%). There will be no written examination.

References

[DELi's directory of references]

Other on-line

Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology. This "on-line" book, available through Internet, surveys the state of the art of human language technology. The book consists of thirteen chapters written by 97 different authors. Editorial Board: Ronald A. Cole, Editor in Chief; Joseph Mariani; Hans Uszkoreit; Annie Zaenen; Victor Zue. Contents: Spoken Language Input, Written Language Input, Language Analysis and Understanding, Language Generation, Spoken Output Technologies, Discourse and Dialogue, Document Processing, Multilinguality, Multimodality, Transmission and Storage, Mathematical Methods, Language Resources, Evaluation.
Our main reference in corpus linguistics will be Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson's book on Corpus Linguistics, but there will be other material available (caché).
European Commission, DG XIII. Information Society, (caché)
La Lingüística Computacional, by Juan Carlos Ruiz Antón, Universitat Jaume I.
Multilingual Information Management: Current Levels and Future Abilities, by Eduard Hovy, USC Information Sciences Institute (co-chair) Nancy Ide, Vassar College (co-chair) Robert Frederking, Carnegie Mellon University Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa
Information retrieval & natural language processing, by Felisa Verdejo, Julio Gonzalo and Anselmo Peñas at the UNED Natural Language Processing Group under the auspices of the ACO*HUM European network, and partially funded by ELSNET.
Natural Language Research Group (UPC)
Walter J. Ong SJ and the Technology of Writing

In print

Allen, 1987 (1st edition) or 1995 (2nd edition). Natural Language Understanding.
Arnold, Douglas, L. Balkan, Lee Humphreys, and S. Meijr, eds. 1994. Machine translation: introductory guide. Blackwell Publishers.
Gazdar, Gerald & Chris Mellish. 1989. Natural Language Processing In Prolog. An Introduction to Computational Linguistics. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Hutchins, W. J. and Harold Somers. 1992. An introduction to machine translation. Academic Press.
Jones, Daniel. 1996. Analogical Natural Language Processing. 1996. University College London Press.
Jurafsky & Martin. 2000. Speech and Language Processing
McEnery, Tony. 1992. Computational Linguistics: A handbook and toolbox for natural language processing. Sigma Press.
McEnery, Tony and Andrew Wilson. 1996. Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press .
Manning & Schütze. 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.
Melby, Alan K. and C.T. Warner. 1995. The Possibility of Language. A discussion of the nature of language, with the implications for human and machine translation. John Benjamins. Amsterdam.