151818914 NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING ( 3 Crd.Hrs )

This course aims at presenting a fairly broad graduate-level introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP), the study of computing systems that can process, understand, or communicate in human language. The primary focus of the course will be on understanding various NLP tasks, algorithms for effectively solving these problems, and methods for evaluating their performance. There will be a focus on statistical learning algorithms that train on (annotated) text corpora to automatically acquire the knowledge needed to perform the task. The course material will discuss general issues as well as present abstract algorithms. Implemented versions of some of the algorithms will be provided in order to give a feel on how the systems discussed in class “really work”; and allow for extensions and experimentation as part of the course projects. Course Objectives Upon completion of the NLP course, the student shall be able to handle and describe different advance mathematical and formal concepts of NLP and the related algorithms, build different types of corpora for text, images, and speech collections, use the latest off-the-shelf tools for NLP tasks, select and employ different feature types, acquire the skills to design and implement different types of NLP applications, and differentiate between NLP and artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of tasks and algorithms.