Lecture 2: morphological analysis and language models

We continued our introduction to regular expressions in Perl. We also introduced finite state transducers for encoding the lexicon and orthographic rules. Today's lecture is about language models. We discussed the importance of language models and how we can approximate real language with them. We introduced N-gram models (unigrams, bigrams, trigrams), together with their probability modeling and issues.

Lecture 1: introduction and morphology (1)

We gave an introduction to the course and the field it is focused on, i.e., Natural Language Processing, with a focus on the Turing Test as a tool to understand whether "machines can think". We also discussed the pitfalls of the test, including Searle's Chinese Room argument.

In the second part, we introduced words and morphemes. Before delving into morphology and morphological analysis, we introduced regular expressions as a powerful tool to deal with different forms of a word.

Homework 1: watch 2001: a Space Odyssey!
Homework 2: read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

So, you see, you now have two homeworks already...

IMPORTANT: Each lecture will start around 12.55 and end at 4 (with a 10-minute break after about 1 hour 1/2). No lecture on Fridays.

Final course schedule: Thursday 12.45-15.45pm

Pfiuuu! Done! The final course schedule is then Thursday 12.45-15.45pm, in Via Salaria 113, third floor, seminar room (aula seminari)! We will not start before 1pm, so if you are coming from Via Ariosto, take your time. We will discuss the 15-20 min range together!