Tutorial: Machine Learning Methods in Natural Language Processing

Statistical or machine learning approaches have become quite prominent in the Natural Language Processing literature. Common techniques include generative models such as Hidden Markov Models or Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars, and more general noisy-channel models such as the statistical approach to machine translation pioneered by researchers at IBM in the early 90s. Recent work has considered discriminative methods such as (conditional) markov random fields, or large-margin methods. This tutorial will describe several of these techniques. The methods will be motivated through a number of natural language problems: from part-of-speech tagging and parsing, to machine translation, dialogue systems and information extraction problems. I will also concentrate on links to the COLT and kernel methods literature: for example covering kernels over the discrete structures found in NLP, online algorithms for NLP problems, and the issues in extending generalization bounds from classification problems to NLP problems such as parsing.