Computational
Linguistics addresses the fundamental questions at the intersection of
human languages and computer science. How can computers acquire,
comprehend and produce natural languages, such as English? How can
computational methods give us insight into observed human language
phenomena? How can you get a job at Google? In this interdisciplinary
introductory course, you will learn how computers can do useful things
with human languages, such as translate from French into English,
summarize a magazine article into a few sentences, and find the main
topics in the day's news. You will also learn about how computational
methods can help linguists explain language phenomena, including
automatic discovery of different word senses and phrase structure.
Over
the past decade, computational linguistics has been revolutionized by
statistical and probabilistic methods; you will learn about robust
methods of probabilistic parameter estimation and inference. The course
will include learning new methods, discussions, and hands-on
laboratories. While some limited computer programming will be
necessary, the course does not assume previous experience in
programming.