Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

Teaching machine translation and translation technology: a contrastive study

The Machine Translation course at Dublin City University is taught to undergraduate students in Applied Computational Linguistics, while Computer-Assisted Translation is taught on two translator-training programmes, one undergraduate and one postgraduate. Given the differing backgrounds of these sets of students, the course material, methods of teaching and assessment all differ. We report here on our experiences of teaching these courses over a number of years, which we hope will be of interest to lecturers of similar existing courses, as well as providing a reference point for others who may be considering the introduction of such material

Universal, Unsupervised (Rule-Based), Uncovered Sentiment Analysis

We present a novel unsupervised approach for multilingual sentiment analysis driven by compositional syntax-based rules. On the one hand, we exploit some of the main advantages of unsupervised algorithms: (1) the interpretability of their output, in contrast with most supervised models, which behave as a black box and (2) their robustness across different corpora and domains. On the other hand, by introducing the concept of compositional operations and exploiting syntactic information in the form of universal dependencies, we tackle one of their main drawbacks: their rigidity on data that are structured differently depending on the language concerned. Experiments show an improvement both over existing unsupervised methods, and over state-of-the-art supervised models when evaluating outside their corpus of origin. Experiments also show how the same compositional operations can be shared across languages. The system is available at http://www.grupolys.org/software/UUUSA/Comment: 19 pages, 5 Tables, 6 Figures. This is the authors version of a work that was accepted for publication in Knowledge-Based System

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems