Modules Taken at the University of Edinburgh
In most cases I've linked to module descriptions, rather than module home pages. The former contain links to the latter.
Term 1 (October-December) | |
|---|---|
| Probabilistic Modelling and Reasoning | Chris Williams |
| Theoretical Linguistics | Mark Steedman & Caroline Heycock |
| Speech Processing 1 | Simon King |
| Informatics Research Methodologies | Alan Bundy |
| Learning from Data 1 (Audited) | David Barber |
|
Intensive Hands-On Introduction to XML (AKA Document Management) | Henry S. Thompson |
Term 2 (January-March) | |
| Data Intensive Linguistics | Miles Osborne |
| Dialog and Natural Language Generation | Johanna Moore |
| Natural Language & Speech System Design: Question & Answering Systems | Bonnie Webber & Johan Bos |
| Techniques in Natural Language Processing 2 | Alex Lascarides |
| Speech Processing 2 (Audited) | Simon King |
Projects
Many of these courses involved programming projects or papers. Here is a brief summary of this work:- Data Intensive Linguistics. explored maximum entropy machine learning techniques and bagging ("bootstrap aggregating") to build a named entity recognizer for Dutch and Spanish data taken from the CoNLL-2002, Sixth Conference on Natural Language Learning shared task.
- Dialog and Natural Language Generation. Looked at several problems in natural language generation by generating various types of utterances from text plan messages generated by the BEETLE system, using a prolog implementation of the SPUD natural language generation system. I'm continuing this line of research in my MSc dissertation project.
- Natural Language & Speech System Design. Worked with a team of 12 to develop a working Question & Answering system, to assist librarians at the University of Edinburgh in fielding questions. The system was implemented with a variety of languages and technologies including Perl, Java, XML (w/the DOM), and several off-the-shelf language processing tools. I led a group of four that worked on the Question Analysis module of the system and assisted in other areas of the project.
- Techniques in Natural Language Processing 2. aka Semantics and Pragmatics of NLP. Final paper compared Mats Rooth's theory of focus interpretation, based on alternative semantics, to Mark Steedman's theory of information structure, based on CCG, paying special attention to the possibility of using these theories in computational work.
- Intensive Hands-On Introduction to XML. Created a XML calendar markup language for creating calendars with extensible and customizable event specification, and a set of XSL stylesheets to generate HTML from XML calendars, for viewing the calendars in daily, weekly and monthly formats.
I have papers and/or software from these projects that can be furnished upon request. I haven't posted them because they're not in publishable format, but if you'd like to look at any of them send email.