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Core Courses
Core Courses are offered every year with basically stable
content. The winter semester lasts from mid-October to the
end of February, the summer semester goes from the middle
of April to late July.
For a detailed description of all core courses and
seminars consult the
Module Handbook ("Modulhandbuch")
[PDF]. All M.Sc. course descriptions are in English.
Winter Semester
- Foundations
of Language Science and Technology
Lecturers: Hans Uszkoreit and
others
Lecture with exercise sessions
This course will include the following topics:
- Map of LS&T
- Why is language/speech difficult and
interesting?
- Ambiguity, commication. inference ...
- Linguistic phenomena, levels, concepts
- phonetics, prosody, morpholoy, syntax ...
pragmatics
- Automata, morphology
- CFGs, parsing
- Corpora and data-intensive linguistics
- Human parsing: memory limitation + attachment
- Differences between human + machine processing
- Logic, ontologies, wordnet
- HMMs: grapheme-phoneme-convert
- Machine learning
- Spoken dialog systems
- Syntactic
Theory
Lecturer: Valia Kordoni
This course focuses on the characteristic properties
of different grammar models, Phrase Program in Brief
Grammars, Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG),
Head-Driven Phrase Program in Brief Grammar (HPSG),
and Construction Grammar (CG). The aim of the course
is to make the students familiar with the above
mentioned formalisms and theories, as well as with
deep theoretical and computational grammars for
specific phenomena in languages such as German and
English, among others.
- Language
Technology I
Lecturers:
Hans
Uszkoreit and others
This course will include the following topics:
- Information Management:
- Classification
- IR, Summarisation, IE
- Named-entity recognition
- Language checking
- Question Answering
- Computational
Psycholinguistics
Lecturer: Matt Crocker
Computational psycholinguistics is concerned with
the development of computational models of how
people process natural language. Models are guided
by the desire to explain the cognitive architectures
and mechanisms that underlie language comprehension,
as revealed by evidence from on-line
psycholinguistic experiments. This course will begin
with an introduction to the aims and central issues
in psycholinguistic research, summarising the key
empirical observations about human language
understanding before considering a range of models
which have been proposed. In examining a wide range
of computational models -- symbolic, probabilistic,
connectionist, and also 'hybrid' computational
mechanisms -- we consider both how well models
explain human behaviour, as well as what they
contribute to central theoretical debates concerning
the nature of language acquisition and linguistic
performance.
- Speech
Science
Lecturers: William Barry and
others
This course gives an overview of and provides
accompanying practical exercises in the three main
areas of Speech Science: speech production, the
acoustic structure of speech and speech-sound
perception. The topics covered include the anatomy
and physiology of speech-sound production;
articulation and the symbolic representation of
speech; theories of speech-production control; the
source-filter model of speech production and the
acoustic properties of sound classes; the ear and
hearing physiology, theories of speech-sound and
speech perception.
- Speech
Technology
Lecturer: Dietrich Klakow
The core of any speech recognizer is a pattern
classification system. In this course, we will cover
the basic principles of pattern recognition and
machine learning and see how they are applied to
speech recognition. Specific topics will be:
- Bayes Classifier
- Normal Distribution
- Parameter Estimation
- Nearest Neighbor Classifier
- Gaussian Mixture Models
- Decision Trees
- Hidden Markov Models
- Acoustic Modeling
- Adaptation
- Search
Summer Semester
- Semantic
Theory
Lecturers: Manfred Pinkal and
others
This course teaches the prevalent formalisms and
methods in natural-language semantics and their
applications in natural language understanding
systems. The students acquire the background
knowledge necessary for an understanding of the
current literature, and are acquainted with
phenomena and methods in the semantics of words,
sentences and texts, together with their formal
modelling, as well as with the modelling of the
syntax semantics interface and the interface to
logic-based inference systems.
- Phonological
Theories
Lecturers: William
Barry and others
This course provides an overview of and
applicational practice in the main phonological
theories of the 20th century. Apart from offering
knowledge of these theories, one of the main goals
is to place present-day approaches into a wider
theoretical perspective and avoid a blinkered
acceptance of any one school of thought. Topics
covered will include Structuralist schools and
theories of the Phoneme; feature specification and
generative rules in linear generative phonology; the
cyclical stress rule; the shift to non-linear
phonology and the autosegmental-metrical approach
with feature geometry and hierarchical segmental and
prosodic representations; phonology and variation -
from linear generative rules to Optimality Theory.
- Computational
Linguistics
Lecturers:
Geert-Jan
Kruijff and others
This course will include the following topics:
- Formal language theory, complexity
- (two-level morphology)
- Grammatical formalisms
- Algorithm for grammatical processing:
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- Features & unification
- Parsing and generation algorithms
- Semantic processing
- Statistical language processing
- n-grams, PCFGs, parameter estimation,
smoothing, corpora
- Exercises in Prolog
- Language
Technology II
Lecturers:
Manfred
Pinkal, Valia Kordoni and others
This course will include the following topics:
- Machine Translation, Multi-lingual Language
Technology
- Natural-Language Interaction & Dialog
- Computer assisted learning
Part of the course are practical exercises using
Java and/or C++
- Experimental
Methods
in Psycholinguistics
The goal of this course is to enable students to
critically evaluate experimental studies in the
literature and, more centrally, to run well designed
experiments of their own. This seminar will focus on
the fundamental concepts and skills necessary to
psycholinguistic experimentation, including design,
assembly, data collection, analysis and
interpretation of results. Following an introduction
to various experimental tasks and issues of design
and analysis, students will be required to conduct
an experiment of their own, assembling the
materials, collecting and analyzing the data, and
finally presenting the results to the class.
Bridge Course
To make the transition for all students from different
backgrounds easier we offer a preparatory course at the
beginning of the semester that introduces the field. In
two weeks the most important areas are presented
accompanied by small practical exercises.
Courses Archive
Search all
past and current courses taught in the program. All
M.Sc. course descriptions are in English.
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