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COMP248: Textbooks and Online Resources

The material in the unit covers a wide range of NLP-related theory and applications. In this page you can find information about the books and online resources that you will need.

Books

We've decided this year, to cut down on costs, not to have a textbook. There's sufficient material on the Web, as outlined below, that you don't need to buy a textbook.

Two main sources we'll use are as follows:

• Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos and Kristina Striegnitz's Learn Prolog Now!, for the basics of Prolog; and
• Patrick Blackburn and Kristina Striegnitz's Natural Language Processing Techniques in Prolog, focussing more on specifics of NLP.

Readings

Each week there will be some assigned readings for the unit, typically from the online resources pointed to below. These readings are obligatory: you will not understand the lectures if you do not keep up with the reading, and you will not be able to do the practicals if you do not do the reading.

Additional Resources

Chatterbots

The first weeks of the unit will focus on the programming of a chatterbot. We will use Program N from the ALICE AI foundation. The chatterbot is a free download and straightforward to install. There's also an associated dictionary you'll need for some work, plus I've zipped up the ALICE files that work with Program N for you to try out. (These are local copies.)

• Program N with AIML Standard Set
• WordNet dictionary
• ALICE files

Text Editor

An excellent text editor that we recommend to edit text (Prolog, C, Python, HTML, XML, AIML, ...) is Emacs or one of the variants.

• Visit the Emacs web site to download the editor.

Prolog

• We will make extensive use of Paul Brna's online Prolog Programming: A First Course. This is also available as a PDF file.

• Another useful online book is Gerald Gazdar and Chris Mellish's Natural Language Processing in Prolog.

• A particularly useful book is

  Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers by Michael Covington.
  Paperback edition (1994)
  Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0-13-629213-5

  There are five copies of this book in the Macquarie University library, at Call Number QA76.73.P76.C67/1994.

  All the programs in Covington's book are available for download from http://www.ai.uga.edu/ftplib/natural-language-book/.

• You may also find it useful to purchase a Prolog textbook; the following books provide good introductions to the language:

  • Michael A. Covington, Donald Nute, Andre Vellino, Prolog programming in depth, Prentice Hall, c1997. x, 516 p. Call no: QA76.73.P76.C68/1997 [1 copy in reserve].
  • Bratko, Ivan. Prolog programming for artificial intelligence, Wokingham, England ; Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., c1990. xxi, 597 p. Call no: Q336.B74/1990 [1 copy in reserve].

• The version of Prolog that we will use in the unit is SWI Prolog.

  • Visit the webpage of SWI Prolog for downloads and documentation

• Some other online Prolog resources can be found here.

Linguistics

The basic elements of linguistics that we need for the material will be covered in the lectures, and supported by some other relevant material. However, if you find the linguistic concepts difficult, you may want to look through the following book:

• Noel Burton-Roberts. Analysing Sentences: An Introduction to English Syntax, Longman, London, 1986. Call no: PE1375.B87/1986