C661: Final Examination

Fall 1995

If you have questions about the exam, in particular if terms are not clear, please post them to the newsgroup so everyone will see the response.

The exam is due at 11:59:59 pm on Monday, December 11. Either electronic or hardcopy submissions are acceptable.

A. Symbolic and Connectionist NLP

1. Compare a symbolic and a connectionist approach to script-based story understanding with respect to the following:
   • pronoun reference resolution
   • inference
   • script instantiation

B. Symbolic NLP

1. Show (a) how a bottom-up chart parser would handle the following sentence containing a novel word and (b) how the resulting parse might be used to infer the syntactic category of the novel word.
   • John placed the chair zelig the table.
   Your grammar rules need not be of the fancy HPSG variety.

2. Show how a unification grammar would handle article-noun agreement in English. You will need a distinction between mass and count nouns (e.g., water, love, honesty vs. cup, word, idea) and between singular count and plural count or mass indefinite articles (a vs. some). Your grammar should accept the following:
   
   • a cup
   • some cups
   • some water
   but reject the following:
   
   • *some cup
   • *a cups
   • *a water
   Give the necessary grammar rules and the lexical entries for the words a, some, water, cup, and cups, and show how the phrases would succeed or fail during parsing. You can ignore the details of the parser (assuming that the right entries or rules are magically selected), and your rules and lexical entries can deviate from standard HPSG ones.

C. Connectionist and Statistical NLP

1. You have the task of developing a system which can assign one of a set of 10,000 classifications (e.g., medieval European history, cell biology, knowledge representation) to the journal articles received by a library. The system should work without the benefit of a grammar or a dictionary but simply make use of the statistical properties of the texts. Describe the system you design for this task and how you would train it.

2. What connectionist options are there for representing (or learning to represent) the structure of phrases such as the following?
   • a green square
   • a green square to the right of a circle
   • a green square to the right of a circle containing two blue triangles
   • a green square to the right of a circle containing two blue triangles on either side of a green square

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Last updated: 8 December 1995, 0:03
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