Andreas Witt, University of Tübingen
From its very beginning Computational Linguistics (CL) was regarded as a promising field for useful and/or commercially interesting applications. Indeed, a driving force for starting combining research in computer science and linguistics was the (rather naïve) hope to develop Machine Translation Systems. Ironically, the main impact of research in computational linguistics was a theoretical one. Today, almost all branches of linguistics are heavily influenced by results of research conducted in CL.
In recent years, however, CL has also becomes more and more relevant for real-world applications. One reason for this is the increasing demand for document processing, which can be supported significantly through techniques of text-oriented CL or Text Technology.
The main sub-areas of CL relevant for document technology are: (1) Text Classification, (2) Machine Translation, (3) Text Generation, (4) Summarization, and (5) Information Retrieval.
The course will give an overview of these fields. Although in (commercial) applications numeric methods play a dominant role the course addresses symbolic as well as statistical approaches.
This is an Introductory Level course. (2ECP for attendance and completing exercises successfully)