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We finished grading today, and the results are not terribly (nor exceptionally good): there are two As (at 217 and 215 points, respectively, out of a total of 250), three Bs, four Cs, five Ds, 2 Es (at 106 and 88 points), and one F (69 points). Congratulations to everyone! In case you want to discuss (your) results, please email me to make an appointment. The external examiner, incidentally, was Lars Bungum¡ªa former IT-SLP student and now a doctoral fellow in language technology at NTNU. In case you have not yet submitted your on-line course feedback, please remember to do so. And finally: god sommer!

We have now officially registered results for all obligatory assignments (and johan is in the process of emailing individual feedback): everyone who submitted for the sixth and final exercise also qualified for the exam. In total, there are 20 students who qualified for the exam, contrasted with 31 who submitted something for the first exercise, and 25 who (still) submitted for the second one. Good luck with the exam!

The model solution for the Esperanto assignment is now available: as always, on the IFI Linux environment, execute the shell command solution6 to have a new sub-directory copied into your home directory.

Some of you are asking (already :-) about the reading requirements for the final exam. These are relatively straightfoward: (a) those parts of Jurafsky & Martin (2008) and Sag, Wasow, & Bender (2003) that were assigned reading on the detailed course plan (and not marked as background or reference material) and (b) all course materials, specifically the slide copies and our model solutions to the six obligatory assignments. For the actual exam, you will not be allowed to use any books, papers, or other tools (except a pen, obviously).

Just as with earlier versions, the model solution for the last assignment is available on the IFI Linux environment: at the shell prompt, run the command solution5 to have a new sub-directory for you; please compare our solution to yours and form an opinion on what you find more or less elegant.

I am afraid I need to cancel the lecture today due to illness (I am on sick leave all week but until today had hoped I could try to hold the lecture, nevertheless). In case there are aspects of the current assignment that need further clarification, please email both Johan and me, and remember the upcoming submission deadline this Sunday. Next week, we will review our model solution in the laboratory on Tuesday and start joint work on the sixth and final obligatory assignment. On Thursday, we will open a new chapter and look at the interplay of grammar-based parsing and statistical modeling.

My apologies, I had failed to communicate with Johan about distributing the fifth obligatory assignment earlier this week! It is now on the web, together with our model solution for the previous assignment. Also note that our next joint session is on Tuesday, April 14. This will be our last chance to work jointly on this assignment (which is due on April 19), hence please make sure to get started on the new assignment immediately, and bring remaining questions or issues to the laboratory. God p?ske!

Please note that I have updated the set of slides used in the lectures of March 12 and March 19. There are two additional slides, viz. pages #5 and #16.

I have compiled a summary of results from the mid-way questionaire, which we will discuss briefly in class tomorrow. Also, please note that we have posted a number of updates to the course schedule in the past few days, including postponing the submission deadlines for the fourth and fifth assignments.

Due to popular demand, we do (this one time) what we said we would not want, i.e. extend the submission deadline for the second obligatory assignment. We will accept submissions until the end of the day on Monday, January 23 (i.e. the night before our next laboratory session, where we will present the model solution). Those who have submitted their assignments already are free to re-submit (though obviously not required to :-). For those who still find the basics of Lisp challenging, I recommend you use half a day or so to work through select chapters from the Practical Common Lisp introductory book, specifically chapters 1, 2, 4 through 6, 12, and (parts of) 22. As always, if in dire straits, feel free to email Johan and Stephan for help.

Thanks, everyone, for the timely submissions to the first assignment. We have now posted the first model solution, which will review and discuss in our laboratory next Tuesday. Also in that session, we will introduce a few more Lisp elements and start work on the second obligatory assignment (which has its submission deadline only two weeks from now, on February 18).

With mild horror, I realize that I failed to introduce the data structure mentioned in the second part (9d) of the current exercise, so-called property lists. In other words, the second occurence of (d) (starting with Use a property list ...) should not have been there. Please just ignore the duplicate part (9d), i.e. pretend it was not there! Furthermore, part (10d) somewhat mysteriously ends with the suggestion (see below). This is a copy-and-paste error, and there is nothing more to see below; so please just ignore that last phrase in part (10d). My apologies for the confusion!

Our laboratory has been moved to kursrom 207 in Vilhelm Bjerknes hus, on Tuesdays between 10;15 and 12:00 (i.e. the time is unchanged). The first session will be tomorrow, Tuesday, January 20, where we will give an introduction to Common-Lisp (as our programming language for this class) and a demonstration of the programming and grammar engineering software environment that we will be using. Also, we will distribute the first obligatory assignment and, time permitting, jointly start to work on this problem set.

This course is open to exchance students and will be taught in English (which makes sense anyway, as all literature for the class is English too). No specialized background knowledge is required, but some prior exposure to basics of computation, programming, and grammar will be an advantage. The class uses two standard text books, one a comprehensive overview of Computational Linguistics (mostly from a processing point of view), the other a reasonably formal introduction to computational grammar (mostly from a linguistic point of view). Both books should be in stock at Akademika already, and we expect all course participants to have their own copy available throughout the semester. We will post reading assignments for the first few weeks of the semester in the next few days.