Application of Computational Linguistics

Pius ten Hacken, English Seminar, WS 2001/02

[Schedule and topics 2001] [Schedule and topics 2002] [Literature]

Description

Products of Computational Linguistics (CL) are increasingly used in a wide range of contexts, including Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Machine Translation (MT). In order to understand how such applications can be used successfully, we will consider how they are conceived, developed, and evaluated.

The organization of the course is as follows. The field of CL is first introduced in its historical context. Then an overview of the selected types of application, including at least CALL and MT, will be given. After this, individual topics or systems will be presented by the participants on the basis of texts and, as far as they are available, running programs. In the selection of applications, topics, and systems, the preferences of the participants can be taken into consideration.

Meetings take place on Fridays, 14:15 - 15:45 in room 8, English Seminar, Nadelberg 6/8

The course is intended for students of English who have completed their first year introduction in linguistics. No programming knowledge is presupposed. Other students are requested to contact the teacher about specific conditions.

Schedule of topics

Below is a list of topics for each week and the preparation required. References to the literature are expanded below the table. Links to PowerPoint presentations will be added as the semester progresses. The topics for the weeks after Christmas are still provisional.

Date	Topic	Preparation
26 Oct 2001	Introduction
2 Nov	Machine Translation: introduction	Read: Kay (1997)
9 Nov	Systran (Susanne Peters)	Read: Wheeler (1987)
16 Nov	Météo (Marianne Nilsen)	Read: Hutchins & Somers (1992), Ch. 12
23 Nov	Translator's Workstation (Stefan Kristmann)	Read: Hutchins (1998)
30 Nov	Dies Academicus
7 Dec	Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Multimedia systems (Regula Fischer)	Read: Warschauer (1996)
14 Dec	Vocabulary Trainers (Chantal Morand)	Read: McCreesh (1998)
21 Dec	Intelligent CALL [pdf] [ppt](Thomas Leisibach)	Read: Garrett (1995)
28 Dec	Christmas holidays
4 Jan 2002	Christmas holidays
11 Jan	MaturandInnentag, no course
18 Jan	Text-to-Speech (R. B.)	Read: Dutoit (1997), § 1.1 and 1.2 Read: Cole et al. (1997), § 5.1 and 5.2
25 Jan	Text Summarization [pdf] (Noah Bubenhofer)	Read: Cole et al. (1997), §7.4
1 Feb	Dialogue Systems (Adrian Engler) Answer extraction (Alexander Deubelbeiss)	Read: Allen (1987), Ch. 16
8 Feb	Application of lexical resources (Dorota Smyk & Evanthia Petropoulou)	Read: Ten Hacken & Tschichold (2001)
15 Feb	Conclusion

Literature

A file with suggested readings is kept at the English Seminar. It contains all articles you should read to prepare for the individual weeks. The complete references of these articles and of some others mentioned in the course are given below. Additional references can be found in the files for the presentations. Please note that this is NOT intended as an overview of recent trends or current state of the art. For a general on-line orientation you may also consult ICT4LT.

In the discussion of dialogue systems, the Eliza system was mentioned. There is a demo version on the web, which gives you an impression of the dialogues you can have with it.

Allen, James (1987), Natural Language Understanding, Menlo Park (Calif.): Benjamin & Cummings.

Booth, A. Donald & Locke, William N. (1955), 'Historical Introduction', in Locke & Booth (eds.), Machine Translation of Languages, Fourteen Essays, Cambridge (Mass.): Technology Press of MIT; New York:Wiley & London: Chapman & Hall, p. 1-14.

Cole, Ronald; Mariani, Joseph; Uszkoreit, Hans; Varile, Giovanni Battista; Zaenen, Annie; Zampolli, Antonio & Zue, Victor (eds.) (1997), Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press & Pisa: Giardini.

Dutoit, Thierry (1997), An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Garrett, Nina (1995), 'ICALL and Second Language Acquisition', in Holland, V. Melissa; Kaplan, Jonathan D. & Sams, Michelle R. (eds.), Intelligent Language Tutors: Theory Shaping Technology, Mahwah NJ: Erlbaum, p. 345-358.

ten Hacken, Pius & Tschichold, Cornelia (2001), "Word Manager and CALL: Structured access to the lexicon as a tool for enriching learners' vocabulary", ReCALL 13: 121-131.

Hutchins, W. John & Somers, Harry L. (1992), An Introduction to Machine Translation, London: Academic Press.

Hutchins, John (1998), 'The Origins of the Translator’s Workstation', Machine Translation 13:287-307.

Kay, Martin (1997 [1980]), 'The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation', Machine Translation 12:3-23.

McCreesh, Bernardine (1998), "Integrating CALL into the Vocabulary Classroom", in Jager, Sake; Nerbonne, John A. & van Essen, Arthur J. (eds.) (1998), Language Teaching and Language Technology, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, p. 36-42.

Nirenburg, Sergei (1987), 'Knowledge and Choices in Machine Translation', in Nirenburg (ed.), Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1-21.

Warschauer, Mark (1996), 'Computer-Assisted Language Learning: An Introduction', in Fotos, S. (ed.), Multimedia Language Teaching, Tokyo: Logos, p. 3-20.

Wheeler, Peter J. (1987), 'Systran', in King, Margaret (ed.), Machine Translation Today: The State of the Art, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 192-208.

13-Febr-2002 Pius ten Hacken