Natural language research announcements

["Margaret M. Fleck" <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        LING591 - Fall 2008 course offering
Date:   Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:40:44 -0500
From:   Roxana 
<girju AT cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To:       Roxana 
<girju AT cs.uiuc.edu>
To:     
LING-DEPT-L AT LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
 
<LING-DEPT-L AT LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU>
References:     
<47544369.4030709 AT cs.uiuc.edu>
 
<4782958E.5080909 AT cs.uiuc.edu>



Dear students,

Please find below information on LING591: /Reasoning about Time and
Events/, an advanced seminar course that I'm going to teach next semester.
This seminar would be of particular interest to graduate students doing work 
that
involves advanced natural language temporal and event processing and
reasoning techniques.

For questions, please contact me at 
girju AT uiuc.edu.

Roxana Girju

---

         New Fall 2008 Seminar
   LING 591, Section M, CRN 32058
Advanced Topics in Computational Linguistics
      - Reasoning about Time and Events -

Instructor:                Prof. Roxana Girju 
(girju AT uiuc.edu)
Time and location:         11:00am - 12:20 pm, in FLB, room1126 or Beckman 
Institute (to be decided)

Course Description:
This is a seminar course on advanced topics in computational linguistics
/ natural language processing (NLP). As information processing becomes
more and more critical in our daily life -- 80% of the data companies
deal with is in the form of text -- natural language processing has been
growing dramatically. A hot but challenging topic in NLP, and Artificial
Intelligence in general, is the computational analysis of time and
events. There is a growing need of applications based on information
extraction techniques expanding to include varying degrees of time
stamping and temporal ordering of events and/or relations within a
narrative. The challenges derive from the combined requirements of a
mapping process (text to a rich representation of temporal entities),
representational framework (ontologically-grounded temporal graph), and
reasoning capability (combining inference with temporal relations for
language processing).

The purpose of this seminar is to expose the students to the recent
advances in the research on temporal and event reasoning through
presentations of papers from the top conferences in NLP and its related
areas. One goal of this seminar is to provide an  environment for
students to become familiar with current time/event representations and
models and freely express opinions and criticize the state-of-the-art
research work.

Organization:
Lecture presentations and guided discussions based on reading of
prepared material (given by the instructor and the students). Case
studies and examples will be used to illustrate the practical
application of the main concepts, methods, and tools.  In order to get
the credit for the course, the students are expected to participate in
at least 85% of the talks (they should not miss more than 2 talks during
the semester) and prepare a final project.

Prerequisites:
The course is open to Linguistics, Computer Science, Computer
Engineering, and Library and Information Science students. Background in
at least one of the following (or equivalent) courses is required:
LING 406 (Introduction to Computational Linguistics),
CS 598 DNR (Machine Learning and Natural Language),
LING591 (Computational Semantics for Natural Language)

For questions contact the instructor at 
girju AT uiuc.edu.