Artificial Intelligence 6001, Winter '26
Potential Exam Questions

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Copyright 2026 by H.T. Wareham
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Topic 1. Topic 2, Topic 3, Topic 4,` Topic 5, Topic 6

Questions prefixed by "(*)" involving executing one or more of the algorithms discussed in class.

Topic #1 (Course introduction; Lecture #1)

• What are the two ``flavors'' of NLP as discussed in class?

Topic #2 (The Characteristics of Natural Language; Lecture #1-3)

• What are three of the subdisciplines of linguistics discussed in class? Please indicate the order of these areas with respect to speech recognition.
• What are the two types of phonetics discussed in class?
• What are the two basic types of morphemes?
• What are four of the types of affix morphemes discussed in class?
• What, from the viewpoint of linguistics, are the three basic types of mechanisms required to implement NLP?

Topic #3 (NLP Mechanisms: Finite-state grammars, automata, and transducers; Lecture #5-9)

• What are three of the four finite-state mechanisms discussed in class that are used in natural language processing?
• What is the general form of a production rule in a finite-state grammar?
• What are the two basic operations for a regular grammar or a FSA?
• What are the two main types of FSA discussed in class?
• (*) Given an NFA, circle all of the words in a given set that are accepted by this NFA. the following non-deterministic Finite-state
• What are the three basic operations for a FST?
• (*) Given a FST and a lower (upper) string l (u), reconstruct all upper (lower) strings u (l) such that the string-pair l/u is accepted by the FST above.

Topic #4 (NLP Mechanisms: Context-free grammars; Lecture #9-12)

• What is the general form of a production rule in a context-free grammar?
• What are the two basic operations for a context-free grammar?
• What makes a context-free grammar ambiguous?
• Given a context-free grammar G and a sentence S, draw a derivation-tree for S relative to G.
• Is the context-free grammar G given in the previous question ambiguous relative to sentence S? Answer ``Yes'' or ``No''.
• Is the context-free grammar G given in the previous question ambiguous relative to sentence S? If not, write ``No''. If so, draw a different derivation-tree for S relative to G than the one you gave previously.

Topic #5 (NLP Mechanisms: Neural networks; Lecture #13-14)

• What is the general structure of an artificial neuron?
• What is the general structure of a multi-layer feed-forward neural network?
• What are three of the types of mechanisms for dealing with overfitting discussed in class?
• What are three of the neural-network architectures discussed in class?
• What are three of the types of recurrent neural networks discussed in class?

Topic #6 (NLP Applications; Lecture #15-17)

• What are three of the four types of partial morphological and syntactic parsing discussed in class?
• What is the commonly-used semantic representation formalism discussed in class?
• What are the two types of multi-utterance discourses discussed in class?
• What are the two types of restricted SDS discussed in class that maintain the illusion of dialogue while having the minimum underlying mechanisms for modeling common ground or dialogue narrative?
• What are the two schools of thought within the language acquisition community in linguistics?
• What are three of the four types of spelling errors discussed in class?
• What are two types of spelling-related NLP problems discussed in class?
• What are the three types of automated machine translation discussed in class, and how are they related by the Vauquois Triangle?