Topics In Language Technology

CS342 module schedule 2003-2004

Week	Lecturer	Topic	Note
Week 1 13 Oct	van Deemter	Introduction to LTmore
Week 2 20 Oct	van Deemter	Introduction to NLG more
Week 3 27 Oct	Belz	PROLOG 1 more	2nd hour in lab
Week 4 3 Nov	Belz	PROLOG 2 more	2nd hour in lab
Week 5 10 Nov	Power	An architecture for NLG more
Week 6 17 Nov	Power	Linguistic Realisation 1 more	Second hour in lab
Week 7 24 Nov	Belz	Linguistic Realisation 2	Second hour in lab
Week 8 1 Dec	van Deemter	Microplanning 1
Week 9 8 Dec	van Deemter	Microplanning 2
Week 10 15 Dec	Piwek	Multimodality and Dialogue 1
Week 11 12 Jan	Piwek	Multimodality and Dialogue 2	Some time in lab
Week 12 19 Jan	Power/Scott	Multilinguality
Week 13 Jan 26	All	Help with projects	feedback about module; help with projects; concluding remarks

Week 1: Introduction

Kees van Deemter
Slides from lecture. (Use Adobe Acroread to read pdf)

1. Practicalities:

- Module outline
 and format
- Assessment

2. Language Technology

- What is LT and why is it important?
- A brief history of LT

3. Querying

- The Query game
- Sources of vagueness and ambiguity in language

4. Taster: What is Natural Language Generation (NLG)?

5. (If time allows) How do people use language: An experiment

Week 2: Introduction to NLG

Kees van Deemter
Slides from lecture. (Use Adobe Acroread to read pdf)

This lecture introduces some of the motivations behind
NLG, including various types of practical applications,
and the perspective that NLG offers on human language 
production. 

The NLG pipeline is introduced and compared with ideas in 
psycholinguistics (involving pipelines and monitoring). 

An NLG system (called drt) is demonstrated which
allows input specifications in a graphical version of an
AI representation languages (based on semantic nets).
Output is in English. To show multilingual output,
another, similar system (called drafter2) is demonstrated.

Sources include 

- Reiter and Dale (1997) ``Building Applied
Natural Language Generation Systems''. 
Natural Language Engineering 3, pp.57-87.

- Levelt (1989) ``Speaking''

1. Uses of NLG

2. Methods in research on NLG

3. Components of an NLG program

4. Something about NLG architectures

5. Writing essays: how to avoid plagiarism

Weeks 3 and 4: Knowledge Representation using ProLog


Anja Belz

Weeks 3 and 4: 
Lecture
transparencies; exercises; solutions.

Week 5:
Richard Power
An architecture for NLG

You can download these programs:

generate.pl

rules.pl

utility.pl

Week 6: Linguistic Realisation 1

Richard Power

You can download this program:

grammar.pl.

Week 7:
Anja Belz
Linguistic Realisation 2

Lecture slides, exercises, reading material.

Week 8 and 9:

Kees van Deemter

Microplanning 1 and 2: Overview; (Aggregation and a bit of Lexical choice); Generation of Referring Expressions

Lecture slides

Week 13

Feedback about module; help with projects;

concluding remarks on the relation between NLG and NLU