Dear CS Students,

The Computer Science Department has added a new course to the Spring 2016 Schedule:

Special Topics: Natural Language Processing

prereq: CSCI-UA.0201

Natural Language Processing (aka Computational Linguistics) is an inter-disciplinary field applying methodology of computer science and linguistics to the processing of natural languages (English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, etc.). Typical applications include: information extraction (automatically finding information from text); information retrieval (web searches and other applications involving the automatic selection of “relevant” documents); sentiment analysis (automatic extraction of opinions about a set of issues); and machine translation (automatically translating one natural language to another). Much of the best work in the field combines two methodologies: (1) automatically acquiring statistical information from one set of “training” documents to use as the basis for probabilistically predicting the distribution of similar information in new documents; and (2) using manually encoded linguistic knowledge. For example, many supervised methods of machine learning require: a corpus of text with manually encoded linguistic knowledge, a set of procedures for acquiring statistical patterns from this data and a transducer for predicting these same distinctions in new text. This class will cover linguistic, statistical and computational aspects of this exciting field.

CSCI-UA 480 – 011 (23943) Special Topics: Natural Language Processing

Professor: Adam Meyers

Building: CIWW

Room: 102

Days: MW

Time: 11:00AM — 12:15PM