Statistical NLP Fundamentals

Part I: Getting Started

1. Introduction

• 1.1 A Tale of Two Approaches: We'll explore how both logic-based and data-driven methods contribute to understanding language.
• 1.2 The Science of Language
  • 1.2.1 Linguistics' Big Questions: What are the fundamental questions we ask about language?
  • 1.2.2 Beyond Words: (This section needs a descriptive title based on the content of 1.2.2)
  • 1.2.3 Language and Thought: A Probabilistic View: How can we understand language and thought in terms of probability?
• 1.3 Why Language is Tricky: The Challenge of NLP: Why is natural language processing so difficult? We'll delve into the ambiguity of language.
• 1.4 Getting Down to Business
  • 1.4.1 Lexical Tools: Exploring the resources available for studying words.
  • 1.4.2 Counting Words: Simple yet powerful, we'll see why word frequency matters.
  • 1.4.3 Zipf's Laws: Uncovering the patterns in how often words appear.
  • 1.4.4 Collocations: Discovering which words tend to go together.
  • 1.4.5 Concordances: Analyzing the contexts in which words occur.
• 1.5 Learn More: Resources for further exploration.
• 1.6 Test Yourself: Exercises to solidify your understanding.

2. Math Essentials

• 2.1 Probability 101
  • 2.1.1 Probability Spaces: The basics of probability theory.
  • 2.1.2 (Add the remaining subtitles from section 2.1 here): ...