Syntactic Analysis / Syntactic parsing

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  • Course date: Spring 2020
  • Teachers:

News

  • 20-05-18: The Q/A session on May 19, 10-12 is moved to Wednesday May 20, 12.30
  • 20-05-18: The deadline for assignment 3 is moved from May 22 to May 25, in order not to be in the middle of the ascension holiday.
  • 20-04-16: More informations about literature seminar 2 is now available. Groups can be found in studentportalen. Note that the groups, and thus times for most of you, has been changed from seminar 1.
  • 20-04-21: Instructions for assignment 4 are now available.
  • 20-04-16: More informations about the literature seminars is now available. Groups for the first literature seminar can be found in studentportalen.
  • 20-04-14: Note that there are further changes in the schedule. Several lectures are turned into Q/A sessions, in order to fit the recorded lecture+discussion format better.
  • 20-04-07: Note that there are some schedule changes for April 9, 14 and 16, see below!
  • 20-03-19: Note that due to the Corona situation the course will be given in distance format. Beacuse of this the schedule is tentative and subject to change. Tentatively most lectures will be given as recorded files that you can listen to at any time. And we will have discussion sessions on Zoom. The first lecture will beheld on Zoom, though. See details below
  • 20-03-19: The first lecture will be held via Zoom, Tuesday March 31. For login details, see studentportalen (from March 30).

Contents

These courses give an introduction to methods and algorithms used in automatic syntactic analysis and provides the skills that are required to apply and implement practical systems based on these methods. The courses cover both phrase structure analysis and dependency analysis.

Examination 5LN713/5LN717 (master)

The course is examined by four assignments, two literature seminars, and a project (only for 7.5 credits).
  1. Assignment 1: PCFG parsing Implement the CKY parsing algorithm and evaluate the parser using treebank data. Detailed description Deadline: 2020-04-28.
  2. Assignment 2: Literature review Summarize, analyze and critically review two scientific articles on syntactic parsing in a written report of 2 pages. Detailed description Deadline: 2020-05-12.
  3. Assignment 3: Dependency parsing algorithms Implement a transition-based parsing algorithm and evaluate the parser using treebank data. Detailed description Deadline: 2020-05-25.
  4. Assignment 4: Cross-lingual dependency parsing Try out and evaluate a neural dependency parser in a cross-lingual low-resource setting. Detailed description Deadline: 2020-05-29.
  5. Literature seminar: Actively participate in two literature seminars. Detailed description
  6. Project (only for 7.5 hp course). Detailed description
    Deadline for defining a project: 2020-05-05.
    Deadline for handing in the project report: 2020-06-05.
    If you do the project in pairs, you also have an informal oral discussion with your teacher on 2020-06-04.

In order to pass the course, a student must pass all assignments (and do the project for 7.5 credits). In order to pass the course with distinction (Väl godkänt), a student must pass either at least three assignments with distinction or pass the project and at least one of the assignment with distinction. The seminars are not graded.

Deadlines

Each assignment has a deadline, which is announced well in advance, see above. Each deadline is at the respective date at 23.59, and all submissions should be done through studentportalen. In case you fail to meet the deadline, you have the chance to re-submit the assignment for a second deadline, which for all assignments is 2020-08-14. (See Språkteknologiprogrammens Policy för examination (In Swedish) and Examination and continued studies.

In case a student hands in an assignment/report that is close to passing, an additional chance of quick resubmission will be given two weeks after the students receives this feedback. For assignments 1-2, you can hand in your resubmission in such a case up until June 5.

Assignments will only be graded in connection with each deadline. If you fail to meet these deadlines, you will have to retake the course the next time it is given. In case of special circumstances, please contact your teacher BEFORE the deadline it concerns.

Seminars

There are two literature seminars during the course, which are common for bachelor and master students. In order to get a passing grade on the seminars you need to prepare for them, and be active during the seminar. Detailed description.

The seminars will be held in smaller groups, which will be announced later.

The two seminars are obligatory. If you miss a seminar, or do not participate actively, you will have to do a complementary task. Contact Sara if this is the case. The deadline for such a report is June 5.

Distance teaching

Due to the Corona situation, the teaching will be online until further notice. In case the restrictions are removed, the course will move back to campus teaching.

The first lecture will be given on Zoom.

Most lectures will tentatively be given in recorded mode, with audio and slides. You will also be given an exercise (non-obligatory) in connection to each lecture. There will then be an online meeting where issues from the recorded lecture can be dicussed, and the exercise will be discussed. It is important that you watch the recorded lectures before each discussion session to get the full value out of the course.

The literature seminars, which are obligatory, will be held on Zoom in smaller groups. Groups and times for each group will be announced later.

There will be three dedicated Zoom sessions where you can get support for the assignments.

There will be a discussion forum in Studentportalen where you can ask questions regarding any aspects of the course, contents, assignments, practicalities and so on. Students are also encouraged to answer questions there. This will be the main mode of communication during the course.

Given that we move to online teaching, it is even more improtant than normally that you take responsibility for your own learning. You will be required to do a lot of reading and other work on your own. Do not hesitate to ask questions on the forum, though!

Note also, that the course was converted to distance learning on very short notice. We will continually evaluate the methods used, and revise as needed. Feedback are welcomed at any point in the course!

Literature

Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Third Edition, Pearson Education, 2019. Available online https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ Chapters 12-15

Sandra Kübler, Ryan McDonald, and Joakim Nivre. Dependency Parsing. Morgan and Claypool, 2009. (Electronic edition)

Two research articles on parsing to be discussed during the literature seminars:

For some lectures, there are lecture notes by Joakim Nivre.
You can also look at the material for previus additions of the course or of related courses:

Additional reading is required. The following is a sample:

Schedule

Note that the schedule in TimeEdit was designed for the campus version of the course, and is subject to change. We will largely follow it, but adapt it to the new onlinother circumstances. Note that the TimeEdit schedule will not be updated. This is the official course schedule.

  • Tuesday 2020-03-31 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom
    Introduction
    Reading: J&M 12.1–12.7.

  • Thursday 2020-04-02 (10–12)
    Cancelled

  • Tuesday 2020-04-07 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom discussion. Please watch recorded lecture first.
    The CKY algorithm
    Reading: J&M 13.1–13.3, 13.4.1, 14.1–14.2..

  • Thursday 2020-04-09 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    NOTE: changed contents Zoom QA for assignment 1
    Zoom discussion. Please watch recorded lecture first.

  • Tuesday 2020-04-14 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    NOTE: moved Zoom QA for assignment 1
    Note: Sara will be there from 10.15 and as long as there are questions, or if requested by students, at other times.

  • Thursday 2020-04-16 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    NOTE: moved Zoom discussion. Please watch recorded lecture first.
    Treebanks, parser evaluation and the Earley algorithm
    Reading: J&M 12.4 (again), 13.4.2, 14.3, 14.7.

  • Tuesday 2020-04-21 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Live lecture advanced PCFG and Zoom QA
    Note: After the lecture part, Sara will be there for as long as there are questions

  • Thursday 2020-04-23 (10-15: times for each group in studentportalen) Sara Stymne
    Literature seminar 1 on Zoom
    Reading: Recurrent Neural Network Grammars

  • Tuesday 2020-04-28 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom discussion. Please watch recorded lecture first.
    Arc-factored dependency parsing, Collins’ and Eisner’s algorithms
    Reading: KMN 1-2, 4.1.4.3 (not 4.2.2).

  • Thursday 2020-04-30 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom QA
    Note: Sara will be there from 10.15 and as long as there are questions, or if requested by students, at other times.

  • Tuesday 2020-05-05 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom discussion. Please watch recorded lecture first.
    Transition-based dependency parsing
    Reading: KMN 2.1.2, 3.1–3.3, 6.1

  • Thursday 2020-05-07 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom QA
    Note: Sara will be there from 10.15 and as long as there are questions, or if requested by students, at other times.

  • Tuesday 2020-05-12 (10–12) Sara Stymne
    Zoom QA
    Note: Sara will be there from 10.15 and as long as there are questions, or if requested by students, at other times.

  • Thursday 2020-05-14 (10-15: times for each group in Studentportalen (note: not the same groups and times as for seminar 1!)) Sara Stymne
    Literature seminar 2 on Zoom
    Reading: Simple and Accurate Dependency Parsing Using Bidirectional LSTM Feature Representations

  • Wednesday 2020-05-20 (12.30-14) Sara Stymne
    Zoom QA
    Note: Sara will be there from 10.15 and as long as there are questions, or if requested by students, at other times.
    Note: moved

  • Thursday 2020-06-04 (10-12; sign up for a specific time slot) Sara Stymne, Ali Basirat
    Oral discussion of pair projects