Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Study Cycle: Master

SUBJECT

Code
Subject
MII1008 Computational Approaches for Natural Language Semantics
Section
Semester
Hours: C+S+L
Category
Type
Intelligent Systems - in English
4
2+1+1
speciality
compulsory
Teaching Staff in Charge
Prof. TATAR Doina, Ph.D.,  dtatarcs.ubbcluj.ro
Aims
The goal of this course is to present the main aspects of Computational Approaches to Natural Language Semantics. Handling human language by computer arises some important semantic questions as for example: semantic similarity within a set of documents or terms, based on the likeness of their meaning/semantic content. Also, in the semantic web era, a growing number of semantic applications started to access and interoperate through the internet. A central concept is
that of domain ontology, which represents the particular meanings of terms as they apply to that domain, and text mining, which includes text categorization, text clustering, concept/entity extraction, sentiment analysis, document summarization, and entity relation modeling. All these aspects are presented in this course.

Content
1. Text entailment (TE) as a step of text understanding. Validation of TE by different methods. RTE contests.
2. Discourse structure. Scoring methods for Reference (anaphora) resolution. Lexical chains and anaphora resolution. Dialogue as a special discourse.
3. Discourse segmentation. Logical and Lexical methods for discourse segmentation. Discourse coherence and cohesion used in discourse segmentation.
4. Text Mining. Text summarization by extract and abstract. Evaluation of summaries. Text categorization by clustering.
5. Natural Language techniques in Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.
6. Compositional semantics. Translation of expressions from Natural Language to intensional logic.
References
1. J.ALLEN : Natural language understanding, Benjamin/Cummings Publ. , 2nd ed., 1995.
2. E. CHARNIAK: $Statistical language learning$, MIT press, 1996.
3. B.CARPENTER: ALE:The attribute logic engine.User@s guide. Carnegie Mellon University,1994.
4. H. Helbig: $Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language$, Springer, 2006.
5. D.JURAFSKY, J.MARTIN: Speech and language processing, Prentice Hall, 2000.
6. C.MANNING, H.SCHUTZE: Foundation of statistical natural language processing, MIT, 1999.
7. (Editor) R. MITKOV: The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2003.
8. S.J.RUSSELL, P.NORVIG: Artificial intelligence.A modern approach, Prentice-Hall International,1995.
9. D.TATAR: Inteligenta artificiala: demonstrare automata de teoreme, prelucrarea limbajului natural, Editura Albastra, Microinformatica, 2001.
ra Academiei, 2000, pg 289-300.
10. D. TATAR: Inteligenta artificiala. Aplicatii in prelucrarea limbajului natural,Editura Albastra, Microinformatica, 2003, ISBN 973-650-100-0
Assessment
(1) Project (providing a NL Semantics techniques tool) .... 30%

(2) Research based on recent papers (at least 2)...30%

(3) Final examination .............................40%
Links: Syllabus for all subjects
Romanian version for this subject
Rtf format for this subject