Topics List for Qualifying Examination: Computational Linguistics

The level of the material will be that of textbooks like the following ones:

• Allen, James. Natural language understanding. Benjamin Cummings, 1987.
• Gal, Lapalme, Saint-Dizier, and Somers. Prolog for natural language processing. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1991.

Syntax and parsing
    Parsing using ATN's or DCG's
    Context-free grammars
    Top-down parsing
    Parsing as search
    Bottom-up parsing
    Mixed-mode methods (chart parsing)
    Features and augmented grammars (i.e., grammars with features):
        handling person/number agreement;
        auxiliary-verb agreement;
        subcategorization;
        local movement (Y/N questions, passives)
        long-distance movement (relative clauses, WH-questions)
 

Semantics
    Word-sense disambiguation using semantic networds
    Logical form and semantic interpretation (as in Allen's text)
    Case (e.g., beneficiary)
    Selectional restrictions
 

Discourse
    Focus in anaphora resolution
    The idea of discourse entities
    Discourse segmentation
    Interactions of tense & aspect and segmentation
    Tracking focus within segments
    Interactions of focus and segmentation