Browse Hierarchy ECS665U: Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Recent years have seen a sharp rise in the use of speech- and language-processing applications. Many of the most important applications for computing now involve the processing and understanding of spoken or written language: dialogue systems like Siri and Cortana let you control devices by talking to them; Google provides automatic translation between languages; text analysis software tries to mine opinions from social media, summarise documents and answer questions. Performing these tasks, and moving beyond them, requires not only recognizing words and sentences, but understanding them: assigning structure and meaning to what people say in a particular context. This course explains why processing human language is a hard problem, requiring insights from logic, linguistics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning. It introduces suitable techniques for categorizing, understanding and generating language -- including statistical and rule-based approaches -- and shows how to apply them in the systems of today and tomorrow.