Prerequisites

Computational linguistics draws, naturally enough, from both the disciplines of computation and linguistics. We expect participants to have some facility in at least one programming language and/or mathematical modeling. In particular, programming competence in Scheme or Java will suffice. 6.034 provides such a prerequisite. If you haven't taken 6.034, then please see me for permission to take the class.

The material covered in this course is selected in such a way that at its completion you should be able to understand current papers in the field of computational linguistics.   All lectures will be published in Adobe pdf format. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader for pdf files on your computer, you can download it from www.adobe.com.

Textbooks

Recommended for puchase or reference (on library reserve):
There is no textbook that you must purchase for the course. However, we will often assign readings from the following text, abbreviated JM in the syllabus.
Jurafsky, D. and Martin, J.H., Speech and Language Processing,  Prentice-Hall: 2000.  ISBN: 0130950696. This book is, however, being revised for its 2nd edition, instead of purchasing the 1st edition, the chapters from the revised edition will be posted in pdf form, as per the schedule shown on the homepage.

Additional recommended references (on library reserve):
Manning, C. D. and H. Schütze: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. The MIT Press. 1999. ISBN 0-262-13360-1.
Barton, E., Berwick, R., & Ristad, E.. Computational Complexity and Natural Language: The MIT Press. 1987. ISBN 0-26-02266-4.
Allen, J.: Natural Language Understanding. The Benajmins/Cummings Publishing Company Inc. 1994. ISBN 0-8053-0334-0.
Brady, J & Berwick, R.: Computational Models of Discourse. The MIT Press, 1983. ISBN-0-262-02183-8.

Readings
We will make available reprints of papers and book extracts, in pdf format, posted under the "Readings" column on the home page.

Additional Resources

• Proceedings of major conferences (related to Natural Language Processing):
• ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics)
• European Chapter of the ACL
• COLING (International Committee of Computational Linguistics)
• ANLP (Applied Natural Language Processing, by ACL)
• ACL SIGDAT, SIGNLL other SIG (Special Interest Groups) Workshops, such as WVLC (Workshop on Very Large Corpora)
• EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)
• Linguist List (for everything you always wanted to say)
• DARPA HLT (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Human Language Technology Workshops)