Seminar on Statistical Parsing and Realization

Ling 884 — Seminar in Computational Linguistics
Spring '09, TR 11:30–1:18, Bolz Hall 0314
Instructor: Michael White
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~mwhite/

Description

After well more than a decade of research, exciting progress continues to be made in statistical parsing, in part through the use of non-local models and linguistically motivated formalisms such as CCG. Meanwhile, recent research on statistical realization has shown how lessons from statistical parsing and machine translation can be combined to improve output quality in broad coverage realization. In this seminar, we will read and discuss seminal and recent research on statistical parsing and realization, with topics drawn from those listed below, as well as any related ones suggested by student input.

Expectations

Students will be expected to actively participate in the discussion and research carried out in the seminar. As detailed below, students will be required to facilitate discussions and post questions on the readings in advance. For projects, students will be encouraged to either work as part of a team on a topic relevant to the seminar, or to carry out an independent class project. Alternatively, for students already working on a related topic, integrating their focus into the seminar will be an option.

Prerequisites

Ling 684.02 or CSE 730 or permission of the instructors.

Carmen

We'll use Carmen to schedule discussion facilitators and post advance questions on the readings. We'll also use the dropbox for project documents.

Requirements

Class participation (20%)

We are aiming for a dynamic discussion of papers, not death by powerpoint. Thus, we plan on taking a page from Eric Fosler-Lussier's playbook, and requiring everyone (this includes you!) to post at least one question to the discussion list on Carmen by 8 p.m. the evening before the assigned readings will be discussed. Participants should also feel free to share their (initial) thoughts and views of the papers in their posts. In particular, questions of the type "What did they mean by X" or "Why did they do X instead of Y" are encouraged. Remember that most of the papers are targeted to people who are already expert in the area, so you shouldn't expect to alway understand everything. Airing such questions can help everyone gain a better understanding of the paper — even those who thought they understood it!

Facilitating discussions (30%)

Each session will have a discussion facilitator. The facilitator should read over the posted questions and choose a subset for discussion. In class, the facilitator should start the session with a five to ten minute summary of the day's readings, including the highlights and lowlights. Following the opening summary, the facilitator is responsible for managing the discussion, and ensuring that as many viewpoints are heard as possible.

Students will be required to facilitate two sessions. If the discussion does not take up the entire class period, the remaining time may be used to (informally) discuss class projects.

Term project (50%)

As noted above, students will be required to carry out a term project, either alone or in a team setting. A project sketch will be required to be presented informally in class for brainstorming during the fifth week, followed by an in-class project report or two-page extended abstract during the ninth week, a presentation during finals week on Tuesday, June 9, and a final report by Thursday, June 11.

Topics

The topics and readings we expect to cover will be refined as the course progresses and listed below.

Parse Reranking

Parsing with Linguistically Motivated Formalisms

Semi-supervised Learning for Parsing

Dependency-based Evaluation

Language Modeling

Constituent Ordering

Maximum Entropy Ranking Models

Measuring Syntactic Distance

Paraphrasing

Policy on Academic Misconduct

As with any class at this university, students are required to follow the Ohio State Code of Student Conduct. In particular, note that students are not allowed to, among other things, submit plagiarized (copied but unacknowledged) work for credit. If any violation occurs, the instructor is required to report the violation to the Council on Academic Misconduct.

Students with Disabilities

Students who need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me to arrange an appointment as soon as possible to discuss the course format, to anticipate needs, and to explore potential accommodations. I rely on the Office of Disability Services for assistance in verifying the need for accommodations and developing accommodation strategies. Students who have not previously contacted the Office for Disability Services are encouraged to do so (292-3307; http://www.ods.ohio-state.edu).

Disclaimer

This syllabus is subject to change. All important changes will be made in writing (email), with ample time for adjustment.