CSCI 587 - Lecture 1 Overview

• Course administration
• Why Natural Language Understanding?
• Major disciplines studying Language
  • linguists
  • psycholinguists
  • philosophers
  • computational linguists
  • artificial intelligence researchers
• Levels of natural language understanding
  • text based information retrieval
  • document/story understanding
  • machine translation
  • dialogue systems
  • speech understanding systems
• Evaluation of NLU systems
  • black box
  • glass box
• Eliza
• Levels of language recognition (page 10)
  • phonetic
  • morphological
  • syntax
  • semantics
  • pragmatic knowledge
  • discourse knowledge
  • world knowledge
• Sytnax vs Semantics vs Pragmatics
  1. Language is one of the fundamental aspects of human behavior.
  2. Green frogs have large noses.
  3. Green ideas have large noses.
  4. Large have green ideas nose.
• A small grammar of a subset of English
• Ambiguity: Rice flies like sand.
• Representing Syntax: grammars/parse trees
  • John sold the book to Mary.
  • The book was sold to Mary by John.
  • Asterisk notation - ill-formed sentence
  • *After it fell in the river, John sold Mary the book.
  • After it fell in the river, the book was sold to Mary by John.
  • * John are in the corner.
  • * John put the book.
  • Flying planes are dangerous.
  • Flying planes is dangerous.
• Representing Semantics
  • Katz and Fodor (1964) "linguistic description minus grammar equals semantics"
  • Semantic markers example
  • Chomsky(1965) Deep structure vs Surface structure
  • Filemore: Case Grammars
  • Shank: Conceptual Dependency
  • Logical form
  • John invited Mary to the Halloween ball.
  • Visiting relatives can be trying.
  • Visiting museums can be trying.

Readings

Chapter 1

Assignment

page 18 #1, #2b, #3