CS4705
CS 4705

•
Julia Hirschberg
– Computational Linguist in CS
– Focus: Spoken Language Processing
– Lab: The Speech Lab , CEPSR 7LW3-A
– Research:
• Deceptive speech
• Charismatic speech
:
• Emotional speech : anger, uncertainty
• Speech summarization : Broadcast News
• Spoken Dialogue Systems
:
Games Corpus
• ` Translating Prosody ’: English - Mandarin

• How can machines recognize and generate text and speech?
• Why do we want them to?
– Searching very large text and speech corpora: e.g. the
Web
– Translating between one language and another: e.g.
Arabic and English
– Summarizing very large amounts of text: e.g. your email
– Building dialogue systems : e.g. Amtrak’s ‘ Julie ’

• If you want to find all references to union activities in New York , what keywords do you specify?
– Union…and…Unions? United? Uniform? Onion?
– Activities…and…Activity? Active? Actor? Action?
• Morphology: how words are composed of smaller units of meaning
• If you want to make your email sound more literate, try varying your syntax without changing your semantics :
– John hit Bill
– Bill was hit by John (passive)

– Bill, John hit
(preposing)
– Who John hit was Bill (wh-cleft)
• Semantics: the context-independent ‘meaning’ of words
• Syntax: the way words are grouped together into larger constituents and phrases
• If you want to find travel information about
Nice , how do you avoid documents on ‘ nice views
’ in
Puerto Rico?
– Word Sense Disambiguation

• If you want to make sure you understand what your friend means when she says
– Some people left the party early.
– Bill doesn’t drink because he’s unhappy.
– John called Bill a Republican and then he insulted him.
• Pragmatics

• Instructor: Julia Hirschberg
– (julia@cs.columbia.edu)
– Office and hours: CEPSR 705, TBA
• Teaching Assistant:
Andrew Rosenberg
– (amaxwell@cs.columbia.edu)
– Office and hours: CEPSR 7LW1-A, TBA
• Syllabus available at http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/cs4705/syllab us.html

• Text: Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin,
Speech and
Language Processing , Prentice-Hall, 2000 (available at CU
Bookstore)
Note errata available on website; check before reading each chapter please; note also that we have new versions of some chapters, available from our syllabus page
• Check courseworks
• Assignments:
– 4 homework assignments
– Midterm and final exams
– Seven ‘free’ late days for homework assignments
– You must get a CS account
• Evaluation: 50% homework + 50% exams

Copying or paraphrasing someone's work (code included), or permitting your own work to be copied or paraphrased, even if only in part, is forbidden, and will result in an automatic grade of 0 for the entire assignment or exam in which the copying or paraphrasing was done. Your grade should reflect your own work. If you are going to have trouble completing an assignment, talk to the instructor or
TA in advance of the due date please. Everyone:
Read/write protect your homework files at all times.

• Look at syllabus
• Read Chapters 1-2 of J&M
• Questions?