Natural Language Processing (Elective-II)

Unit I

Introduction & Word Level Analysis: Origins and Challenges of NLP, Language Modeling — Grammar-based and Statistical LM, Regular Expressions, Finite-State Automata, English Morphology, Transducers, Tokenization, Detecting and Correcting Spelling Errors, Minimum Edit Distance. Word Level Analysis: Unsmoothed N-grams, Evaluating N-grams, Smoothing, Interpolation and Backoff, Word Classes, TF-IDF Vectors, Semantic Analysis, Outline of English Syntax, Introduction to Semantics and Knowledge Representation, Zipf's Law.

Unit II

Syntactic Analysis: Context Free Grammars, Grammar Rules for English, Grammars and Parsing, Top-Down and Bottom-Up Parsers, Transition Network Grammars, Top-Down Chart Parsing. Feature Systems and Augmented Grammars, Morphological Analysis and the Lexicon, Parsing with Features, Augmented Transition Networks. Ambiguity Resolution: Statistical Methods, Probabilistic Language Processing, Part-of-Speech Tagging, Lexical Probabilities, Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars, Best First Parsing, Feature Structures and Unification.

Unit III

Semantics and Pragmatics: Requirements for Representation, First-Order Logic, Description Logics, Syntax-Driven Semantic Analysis, Semantic Attachments, Word Senses, Relations between Senses, Thematic Roles, Selectional Restrictions, Word Sense Disambiguation — Supervised, Dictionary & Thesaurus, Bootstrapping Methods, Word Similarity using Thesaurus and Distributional Methods.

Unit IV

Basic Concepts of Speech Processing: Speech Fundamentals: Articulatory Phonetics — Production and Classification of Speech Sounds, Acoustic Phonetics, Review of Digital Signal Processing Concepts, Short-Time Fourier Transform, Filter Bank and LPC Methods.

Unit V

Speech Analysis: Features, Feature Extraction and Pattern Comparison Techniques, Speech Distortion Measures — Mathematical and Perceptual. Real World NLP Challenges: Information Extraction and Question Answering, Dialog Engines, Optimization, Parallelization and Batch Processing.