Richter: Introduction to Computational Linguistics (WS 12/13)

General Information on the Course

• Moodle pages with course material
• Information Sheet with syllabus etc. (distributed in the first class meeting)
• Classes: Our class meets Wednesdays, 14ct-15.45 in Hörsaal 0.02 at the SfS.
  The course language is English.
• Office Hours: Mondays, 12.00-13.00, SfS, Room 2.17 (Email: f.richter@em.uni-frankfurt.de)
  
• Course Description in the Campus System

Reading assignment for Jan. 30th

Slides and links

• Slides of lecture on Oct. 24th
• Slides of Oct. 31st
  
  • Geoffrey Pullum's poem Scooping the Loop Snooper, a proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable
• Slides of Nov. 7th
  
  • Al Aho's speech at the Dennis Ritchie Tribute earlier this year. In class we listened to the section roughly running from 1:15 to 6:43. The relevance of Dennis Ritchie's work is concisely summarized in Last Word on BBC Radio 4, October 21st, 2011.
  • Recent pictures of data centers of a large computing company. If you look around a bit on the web, you'll find that you can walk through (some of) them in Street View.
• Slides of Nov. 14th
  • English Wikipedia to rescue: Time flies like an arrow;...
• Slides of Nov. 21st
  • The 23 official languages of the EU
  • A bit of nostalgia: The CDC 7600 computer, hardware for MT systems in the 1970s
  • MT history coming alive: SYSTRAN in the 21st century
• Slides of Nov. 28th
  • Having fun with MT: Google Translate
• Slides of Dec. 12th
• Slides of Dec. 19th
  • Side remark: Linux is not Unix; meet Linus Torvalds!
• Slides of Jan. 9th
• Slides of Jan. 16th
• Slides of Jan. 23th
  • Remarks by G. K. Pullum on the Eskimo snow vocabulary
• Slides of Jan. 30th

Files for van Noord's Finite-State Tool

• January 9th:
• The simple regular expression with a, b from the lecture on Jan. 9th
• Another simple regular expression with a,b,c
• More complex example of regular expression and automaton
• Yet another example
• January 16th:
• 3 examples from Karttunen, page 352: Figure 18.8-1, Figure 18.8-2, Figure 18.9
• A simple example for using the cross product operator with regular expressions
• Unconditional obligatory replacement of a by b
• Unconditional obligatory replacement of abc by aaa
• Unconditional optional replacement of a by b
• Slides, p.9: non-determinism of replace (1)
• Slides, p.10: non-determinism of replace (2)

Using van Noord's Finite State Tools at the SfS

• Within the SfS network, this is what you type in a shell to log on to urobe:
  ssh -X urobe --o
  You will then be prompted for your password. Finally, type fsa -tk to start the program.
• Outside the SfS network ('from home'), you first need to connect to the university network by VPN. Once you are on, you open a terminal and type
  ssh -X urobe.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de --o
  to connect to urobe, and you continue like above.
  Important: The fsa toolkit will send a GUI window to your machine, which can take some time in case of slower Internet connections. Depending on the situation, you might have to wait for two minutes until the window opens and you see the Prolog prompt in the terminal. Be patient, get yourself a cup of coffee, or write a Java method. On fast connections, the GUI will open within seconds.

More links

on linguistics

• at the SfS:
  • Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft

• at the Universität Tübingen:
  • The Library Catalogue
  • Sonderforschungsbereich 833 Bedeutungskonstitution - Dynamik und Adaptivität sprachlicher Strukturen

• elsewhere in the world:
  • The History of Mathematics Archive
  • The linguist list

on computational resources

• Introduction to UNIX at the SfS
• Emacs Beginner's HOWTO