Natural Language Processing

The study of Language, Applications of NLP, Evaluating Language Understanding Systems, Different levels of Language Analysis, Representations and Understanding, Organization of Natural language Understanding Systems, Linguistic Background: An outline of English syntax.

Introduction to semantics and knowledge representation, some applications like machine translation, database interface.

Grammars and sentence Structure, Top-Down and Bottom-Up Parsers, Transition Network Grammars, Top- Down Chart Parsing. Feature Systems and Augmented Grammars: Basic Feature system for English, Morphological Analysis and the Lexicon, Parsing with Features, Augmented Transition Networks.

Auxiliary Verbs and Verb Phrases, Movement Phenomenon in Language, Handling questions in Context-Free Grammars. Human preferences in Parsing, Encoding uncertainty, Deterministic Parser.

Statistical Methods, Probabilistic Language Processing, Estimating Probabilities, Part-of Speech tagging, Obtaining Lexical Probabilities, Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars, Best First Parsing. Semantics and Logical Form, Word senses and Ambiguity, Encoding Ambiguity in Logical Form.