ATS2672-ATS3672: Computational Linguistics: An Introduction

10% Assignment 1
15% Assignment 2
25% Take home exam
40% Assignment 3
10% Participation/attendance

To be honest, I didn't like this subject at first, but then it grew on me. Sadly this is a very tiny unit. There were barely enough people enrolled to run the unit at the start of semester, and by the end of semester numbers dwindled down to about 8 people. Suffice to say this unit will probably not run again, which is a pity.

That said however, onto the review. As I said before, I didn't like the subject at first, mostly because I had no idea how to do the first assessment. To his credit, Simon was pretty helpful at trying to explain it to me, but I think because it required a bit of programming knowledge I crashed and burned. Having said that, apart from the first assessment, you really don't need any computing knowledge to do well in this unit -- I managed just fine.

This unit takes you through a basic history of computing and why we might need computational linguistics, as well as various other topics like rules and algorithms, parsing, building a corpus, tagging and annotation, using the internet as a corpus and speech recognition. It's pretty interesting stuff, but what made this unit good was that there was also some hands-on activities. The thing I didn't like was I felt that the activities were too rushed and the lectures dragged on a bit though.

Okay, assessments. The first assessment task had to do with phonology, and I HATED it. Mostly because I don't like phonology, but also because I couldn't wrap my head around the program we were meant to use for the assignment. It sort of runs like cmd, so you type in lines and hope they work. But you also had to write a rules file so it DOES work. I somehow managed a credit, even though my code fell flat on its face, but this assignment is only worth 10% so it's no huge deal if you can't work it out.

The 2nd task is much nicer, it's based on corpus analysis, and so you are given data to interpret and analyse, and explain why you think what you do, along with some references to appropriate literature. The take home exam is pretty straight forward, it is just some short questions on the content covered thus far. If you are a 3rd year you have one extra question to answer.

Now, the last project was pretty cool. It's basically a research project. About halfway through the semester Simon posted a list of possible topics that we could do. There was a topic based on the first assignment, a topic where you had to write a lexicon and a set of rules to parse a passage of text, a topic on variation in English, one on lexicography, and one on semantics. I went with lexicography. In other words, I picked 'new' English word and did a whole heap of research on it. I picked 'noob', and did a 2000 word research report about how I collected a whole heap of web data on the word 'noob' and how/where it is used, and discussed various pros and cons of using the internet as your 'data source'.

If you are a 3rd year, you also have to give a short talk about your research project in week 12. But, it's very informal: I just stood up with only a whiteboard marker and no notes, and just drew diagrams and explained what I was doing until I got sick of it.

I doubt this unit will run next year because of lack of interest. If you are interested, you can still ask Simon about it and I'm sure you could do an Honours project based on some of this stuff, because it really is fascinating.

Simon Musgrave

N/A

4 out of 5

No

None, but there is a reading list online.

Weekly 2hr seminar

2014 sem 2

TBA, somewhere between D to HD 82