Natural Language Processing 2020

The 2020 episode at Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University

Lectures (I-23)

Wednesday, 9:50 - 11:30 (voluntary)

Labs (H-6)

Tuesday, 11:30 - 13:00 (voluntary)

Lectures#

Lesson 1: Intro#

28th of February

Discussed material:

• Course information (see below)
• Basic Text Processing (slides)
  • Regular Expressions
  • Tokenization
  • Text normalization
• Basically the first part of SLP Chapter II

Supplementary resources:

• Eliza Bot Demo: one of the most famous use cases of regular expressions. It is really worth trying out -- you may end up having some surprisingly good conversations.
• Unix for poets: a nice 25 pages worth of examples on how to process text on the Unix command line. Here is a shorter version by the authors of the SLP book.
• Scriptio continua: the reason why English also nearly ended up without word and sentence separators.
• Regex101: a very nice application for working with (and specifically trying out) various regular expression. Note that the link goes to the Python flavor of regular expressions.

Lesson 2: Edit Distance#

4th of March

Discussed material:

• Edit Distance (slides)
  • Edit Distance
  • Weighted Edit Distance
  • Alignment
  • The last part of SLP Chapter II
  • (we did not go into the bio applications …)
• Intro to Language Modeling (slides)
  • The first part of SLP Chapter III

Supplementary resources:

• subsync: a tool for automatically synchronizing subtitles with video (a nice use-case of using alignment in a not-so-ordinary context)
• Autocomplete using Markov chains: a nice example (along with code in Python) that shows how Language Models can be used to generate "text resembling language" and build a simple ‘autocomplete’ engine.

Resources#

Introduction to Natural Language Processing ---- Jacob Eisenstein

Speech and Language Processing, 3rd Edition -- Daniel Jurafsky, James H Martin

A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing -- Yoav Goldberg

Neural Network Methods for Natural Language Processing -- Yoav Goldberg

Grading#

Assignments are available via Google Classroom (the class code is yyozsin) but they are also available in the following repository on GitHub: https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/nlp-exercises

A list of project ideas can be found here.