NB: This is only a preliminary syllabus, which is likely to change once the course starts.
Philipp Koehn: Statistical Machine Translation, 2010. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-0-521-87415-1, Selection, Book web page.
Stephan Oepen et. al.: "Towards hybrid quality-oriented machine translation. On linguistics and probabilities in MT" in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation, 2007. Can be found here.
Daniel Jurafsky og James H. Martin: Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition, 2008. Prentice Hall. ISBN: (978)-0-13-187321-6 . 2. ed, selection, in particular from Ch. 6-10, 24 & 25.
Recommended supplementary reading
Kishore Papineni et. al.: "Bleu: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation" in Fulltext.
Chris Callison-Burch, Miles Osborne and Philipp Koehn: "Re-evaluation the Role of Bleu in Machine Translation Research" in 11 th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL, 2006. Fulltext.
Steve Young: "The statistical approach to the design of spoken dialogue systems" in Technical Report CUED/F-INFENG/TR.433, Cambridge University Engineering Department, 2002. http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/reports/svr-ftp/auto-pdf/young_tr433.pdf.
Recommended background reading
Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll: "Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition" in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2005. Cambridge University Press. 28, 675–735. This article provides some interesting background information on some core ideas from cognitive psychology which are important to understand how dialogue actually works, and why dialogue is fundamentally a shared, collaborative activity. http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/pdf/BBS_Final.pdf.