DCS 533 -- Natural Language Processing

Spring 2003

Main Page Contents
Schedule
News
Lectures

Course People
Matthew Stone
 David DeVault

Schedule

Class Monday 2:50-5:50, Hill 254

News

  • Apr 14.
    Office hours for this week moved to Thursday, 2pm-4pm.
  • Apr 7.
    Here is a reminder of the project timeline.
    • By next week, April 14, submit a short interim report describing what problem you plan to address, what techniques you plan to use, and what research you aim to start from. (The links on this page should provide a helpful starting point.)
    • For May 5, prepare a short powerpoint presentation describing your project topic and background and summarizing your progress thus far. Email the file to mdstone by noon, May 5.
    • For May 13 (Tuesday), submit the final writeup documenting your project work.
    Projects can be done individually or in groups of two or three people. Groups that span differing backgrounds or departments are particularly encouraged.

    Implementations of lexicalized grammar syntax and semantics, including syntactic operations, parsing, generation and deriving resources from examples, are available here.

    Mar 13.
    The complete program shown in class on Mar 3 is now available here. This is the sicstus version; comment out the definition of member for SWI.

    Play with this program to see how it works. (There is nothing to hand in.) Consult the file, and run it by posing the query talk.

    Utterances are represented as a list of words; here's some that you can try: [lets,build,a,shelf], [ok], [what,should,we,do], [use,pine,boards], [use,plywood], [goodbye]. Get the hang of how the dialogue is represented, how decisions are made and how processing is carried out. Tracing is one way to do this. Another way is just to run talk but have additional information printed out by posing the query state(questions), state(last), state(kb) or state(history) beforehand. Turn off the debugging info with the query nostate(parameter).

    Things to try, to make sure you understand the program. Add another question and answer pair of utterances. Get the system to ask the question and get the system to answer it, using the same utterance definitions but different private knowledge bases.

    Make an utterance that's ambiguous because it can link up with the context in more than one way. What happens when the system would need to use this utterance? What happens when you try to use this utterance?

    More substantial changes include: asking and answering clarification questions (and other kinds of subdialogue); allowing for implicit confirmations (and other kinds of implicit context change); handling meta-communication and tracking in a general way.

  • Feb 16.
    For constraint satisfaction, rather than clause(C), you should use clause(C,true).
    Thanks to Lan Yu for spotting the mistake!

Lectures, Readings, Notes

Materials