Computational Syntax

Computational Syntax slides and exercises. This is a compulsory 4.5‐credit course in the HAP/LAP master. It will be presented during the first semester of the course.

Preconditions

• It is recommendable to have a basic knowledge of the basic concepts of Linguistics (those that were taught in secondary school). It is also helpful to know the concepts presented in this master's “Foundations of Linguistics” course

• Programming: it is interesting to understand the basic concepts of programming. Related to this, the course on “Introduction to programming” or a similar one is recommendable

• It is helpful to have a basic understanding of regular expressions

Objectives

• Presentation of the main approaches for the computational treatment of syntax. Among others, context‐free grammars, finite‐state syntax, and statistical models. Several formalisms will be presented. We will also present a main overview of the main algorithms for Tagging, Chunking and Parsing.

• Overview of the role that computational morphology and syntax play on the applications that make use of language technology.

Syllabus

1. Introduction to Computational Syntax

2. Finite‐State Syntax

   2.1. N‐gram Language Models

   2.2. Assignment of Syntactic Categories (POS tagging)

   Knowledge‐based (Constraint Grammar)

   Data‐driven (statistical methods)

   2.3. Chunking

3. Multiword expressions (MWE)

4. Context Free Grammars

   Basic model

   Probabilistic Context Free Grammars

   Unification‐based Grammars

5. Dependency Syntax

   Rule‐based

   Data‐driven

6. Syllabus of practical part:

   Exercises related to finite‐state automata and context‐free grammars

   Examination of examples and resources for the understanding of basic concepts related to computational syntax