Lecture 2: morphology and language modeling (1)

We introduced words and morphemes. Before delving into morphology and morphological analysis, we introduced regular expressions as a powerful tool to deal with different forms of a word. We also introduced finite state transducers for encoding the lexicon and orthographic rules. Today's lecture is about language models. We discussed the importance of language models and how we can approximate real language with them. We also introduced N-gram models (unigrams, bigrams, trigrams), together with their probability modeling and issues.

In the last part I talked about the first part of homework 1 (deadline: April 30th)! Be sure you know all the details by participating in the discussions on the google group. Don't miss the next class on Friday 21st!