Natural language (NL) refers to the language spoken/written by humans. NL is the primary mode of communication for humans. With the growth of the world wide web, data in the form of text has grown exponentially. It calls for the development of algorithms and techniques for processing natural language for the automation and development of intelligent machines. This course will primarily focus on understanding and developing linguistic techniques, statistical learning algorithms, and models for processing language. We will have a statistical approach towards natural language processing, wherein we will learn how one could develop natural language understanding models from statistical regularities in large corpora of natural language texts while leveraging linguistics theories.
CS779 is a research project-based course, participants are required to work on open and unsolved research problems in NLP and consequently, considerable effort is expected from the participant. As in the previous offering of the course, work on the project can possibly lead to a publication.