Funded by the Volkswagen-Foundation, Germany


Course Descriptions


Erhard Hinrichs, Sandra Kübler: Computational Tools for Corpus Linguistics

The increasing popularity of corpus-based linguistics has created a need for (semi-)automatic tools that help with annotating and searching a corpus. In this course we will focus on encoding standards, e.g. XML, and techniques and tools for the following annotation levels: tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and tagset design, morphology, chunk parsing, and sytactic annotation. More...


Valia Kordoni, Frank Richter: A Comparison of LFG and HPSG

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) are widely perceived as closely related paradigms. Both have developed much, though, since their inception, and there is growing evidence that now they may differ more than they agree. The aim of our course is to discuss the comparative strengths and weaknesses of LFG and HPSG, focusing on their ontological presuppositions, formal mechanisms, and the linguistic analyses they propose for various linguistic aims. More...


Anna Kupsc: Slavic in HPSG

The aim of this course is to discuss some aspects of Slavic languages and present analyses of these issues couched within the constraint-based formalism of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar). The course is by and large based on the collection of papers in the volume `Slavic in HPSG' B. Borsley and A. Przepiorkowski (eds.)


Detmar Meurers: Introduction to HPSG

This course is an introduction to some central empirical and theoretical topics in the area of syntax. The theoretical argumentation will be couched in the grammatical framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag 1994), one of the most active frameworks in the area of theoretical syntax as well as computational linguistics. We will start with some fundamentals of syntactic argumentation (e.g., constituent structure) and then turn to the analysis of long-distance dependencies, raising and control constructions, and the so-called binding theory.


Janina Radó: Introduction to Psycholinguistics



Kiril Simov, Gergana Popova: Computational Morphology

Morphological information is an essential part of any realistic natural language processing task. In this course we present an overview of the morphological phenomena found in different natural languages and outline several computational paradigms for processing morphological data. The course will also discuss recent approaches to incorporating morphology into the framework of HPSG.
Course Material


Kiril Simov, Atanas Kiryakov: Declarative Knowledge Representation

We start with a discussion of basic notions like knowledge, reasoning and knowledge representation (KR) from the point of view of theoretical computer science. Next, we walk through the main components of KR systems, and present the main ideas in declarative knowledge representation such as conceptualisation of the world, kinds of knowledge and reasoning, tractability, non-standard semantics, prototypical knowledge, meta knowledge and meta reasoning, knowledge communication. In the following lectures a few knowledge representation languages are covered: KL-One, Knowledge Interchange Format, and Conceptual Graphs. Finally, we devote some attention to the problem of knowledge translation and interchange in a heterogeneous environment, presenting a schema for automatic translation and the agent communication language Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language.
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Kiril Simov, Atanas Kiryakov: WordNets: Principles and Applications

This course is based on "WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database"(Christiane Fellbaum, ed.), on other materials about the EuroWordNet and GermaNet projects, and on the authors' works. First, we make a general overview of the system: its assumptions, goals and principles. Then we present the main semantic relations used in WordNet for structuring the nets of the lexical concepts. Finally, several applications of WordNet such as semantic tagging and information retrieval are discussed.
Course Material


Frank Richter
Last modified: Wed Sep 27 12:19:53 MEST 2000