The assignments in this class will all center around a single project on natural language for the internet. There will be some choice in design of the project, which willinvolve summarization and information extraction. Assignments will be individual concrete modules of this project, culminating in a demo of the full project at the end of the semester. The final exam will be a written take-home exam, examining how theoretical issues addressed in the class might apply to summarization and information extraction. Summarization, particularly multi-lingual summarization, is currently a topic of much interest in the field.
Recent advances make the problem look more feasible than it was in earlier years.
We will study some recent advances in both these areas and use them to focus the course. Summarization is particularly relevant to use of the world wide web and could potentially be used to provide descriptions of available sources in order to allow users to decide whether information at a site is relevant. We will explore other means for integrating natural language into the world wide web as well. This project will serve as a focus for studying the main techniques of natural language processing, which include syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and statistical techniques. There will be four main assignments.