Professor/ Contact Info:	Meeting Time:
Nanette Veilleux, Ph.D. (617) 521-2705 veilleux@simmons.edu	Tues., May 23 rd - Aug 15 th, 2006 Room TBA

Objective: Graduate - level course to explore computational models in current spoken and written language systems. Material will be explored through text readings, student papers and presentations and lecture.

Requirements: Sufficient ability to reason quantitatively. Some students will have extensive linguistic background and others will have substantial computer science/ engineering background.

Text: Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing, 2000, Prentice Hall (on sale at the BU bookstore.) You may also want to find a Perl book and download a Perl interpreter: look around on www.perl.com

Class format: Seminar style. First half of the meeting time will be spend discussing the reading and presenting weekly papers/ projects. The second half will consist of lecture on the coming week's material and group projects.

Project/ Paper examples: Every week, students will be expected to present a paper on a topic from the assigned reading. It could involve extra research in a narrower topic based on given references (or references from references), a computer simulation of one of the computational models presented, or an exploration of the material with respect to a given sample of text/ speech.

Grading: 50% weekly papers (and discussion), 20% midterm, 10% class participation, 20% final

Meeting	Date	Chapter for class discussion	Reading for next week	Turn in on this week
1	May 23	1 Introduction	Read Ch. 2, 3
2	May 30	2 Regular Expressions 3 Morphology	Read Ch. 4	Paper 1 on Ch 2/3
3	June 6	4 Phonology/TTS	Read Ch. 5	Paper 2 on Ch 4
4	June 13	5 Prob Pronunciation	Read Ch 6	Paper 3 on Ch 5
5	June 20	midterm	Read Ch. 7
6	June 27	6 N-grams, 7 Speech Recognition		Paper 4 on Ch6 Paper 5 on Ch 7
	July 4	No class	Read Ch. 8
7	July 11	8 Word Classes	Read Ch. 9/ 10	Paper 6 on Ch 8
8	July 18	9 CF Grammars, 10 Parsing	Read Ch. 12	Paper 7 on Ch 9/10
9	July 25	12 Probabilistic Parsing	Read Ch. 14, 15	Paper 8 on Ch 12
10	Aug 1	14 Semantics 15 Semantic Analysis	Read Ch. 19	Paper 9 on Ch 14/15
11	Aug 8	19 Dialogue		Paper 10 on Ch 19
12	Aug 15	Final

Instructor reserves the right to adapt schedule/ assignments based on her judgment of class progress.