Teaching and Services

Summer Semester 2010

Current Approaches to Dependency Parsing, with Detmar Meurers

Dependency grammar is an increasingly important grammar representation in computational linguistics, with a firm foundation in theoretical and descriptive linguistics. It is particularly well-suited for languages with relatively free word order and supports a transparent mapping from the string to a functor-argument representation needed for many computational applications. Dependency representations also are the new emerging standard for comparing the result of syntactic analysis across different grammar formalisms and parsing approaches.

This seminar will introduce the approaches to dependency parsing, existing implementations, and current research issues. Student projects will explore the training and evaluation of different parsing strategies, including the question of mapping existing treebank annotation schemes to dependency representations for training and testing of parsers.

Winter Semester 2009/2010

Computational Approaches to Functional Elements, with Detmar Meurers

Functional elements such as determiners and prepositions have received only little attention in computational linguistics, yet they contribute significantly to the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic structure of a sentence in context. As such, functional elements offer an exciting perspective into the interplay of different modules of linguistic analysis – and the question how the relevant properties can reliably be identified in the data. At the same time, there are concrete applications for accurate models of functional elements, such as natural language generation or intelligent computer-assisted language learning, where functional elements have been identified as the single most important source of errors.

The course will begin with a discussion of the linguistic aspects and their computational modeling and then turn into a project-driven seminar, in which student groups participate in a challenge to design and implement approaches for predicting preposition and determiner usage.

Summer Semester 2009

Eclipse and Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), with Thilo Goetz

Services

  • ACL 2010 Systems Demonstrations: Member of program committee
  • NAACL-HLT 2010 (Reviewer)
  • European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI): Student Sessions 2006-2009 (Reviewer)
  • International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP) 2005 (Reviewer)
  • Treebanks and Linguistic Theories 2004, Tübingen, Germany (co-organization)