The first lecture on NLP applications of PGMs is fast approaching.  It will be next week on March 11.  We will also have our first two presentations that week.  Please read the following papers in advance of the class:

• A Fast Fertility Hidden Markov Model for Word Alignment Using MCMC, Zhao and Gildea, EMNLP 2010 (presented by Svitlana).
• uses sampling
  
• Extracting semantic orientations of words using spin model, Takamura et. al., ACL 2005 (presented by Charley).
• uses the mean field variational approximation
  

Remember, you also need to submit your review of the Finkel et al. paper on Gibbs sampling by next Thursday.  Happy reading!