ALTA Logo Proceedings of ALTSS/ALTW, Melbourne, December 2003

Practical NLP using Python

Trevor Cohn and Steven Bird, Melbourne


ABSTRACT:

The objective of this course is for students to understand the fundamentals of symbolic and statistical natural language processing, and to apply this understanding in writing small Python programs using the Natural Language Toolkit (nltk.sourceforge.net). Topics covered will include part-of-speech tagging, chunk parsing, parsing with context-free grammars, and annotated linguistic corpora.

BIO :

Steven Bird is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and he teaches human language technology and supervises several research students working in this area. His research focuses on formal and computational models for linguistic information, with application to human language technologies and to the description of the world's ~7,000 languages. Before coming to Melbourne University he did doctoral and post-doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh (1987-94). From 1995-97 he conducted linguistic fieldwork on the languages of western Cameroon, published a dictionary, and helped develop several new writing systems. From 1998-2002 he was associate director of the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, where he led an R&D team working on open-source software for linguistic annotation. [http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~sb/]

Trevor Cohn is a PhD student in Computer Science and Software Engineering at Melbourne University. His research interests include word sense disambiguation and automatic text summarisation. Before commencing his candidature, he spent three years in industry working as a Software Engineer, both at Ericsson Australia R&D labs and KESEM International after completing his undergraduate degree of BComm/BEng(Software)(Hons). [http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~tacohn/index.php]

RESOURCES:

Lecture Materials

Software

Python
Numeric
NLTK
Tcl/Tk