Course Description

This course is about a variety of ways to represent human languages (like English and Chinese) as computational systems, and how to exploit those representations to write programs that do neat stuff with text and speech data, like

• translation,
• summarization,
• extracting information,
• question answering,
• natural interfaces to databases, and
• conversational agents.

This field is called Natural Language Processing or Computational Linguistics, and it is extremely multidisciplinary. This course will therefore include some ideas central to Machine Learning and to Linguistics.

We'll cover computational treatments of words, sounds, sentences, meanings, and conversations. We'll see how probabilities and real-world text data can help. We'll see how different levels interact in state-of-the-art approaches to applications like translation and information extraction.

From a software engineering perspective, there will be an emphasis on rapid prototyping, a useful skill in many other areas of Computer Science.

Course Prerequisites

CS courses on data structures and algorithms, and strong programming skills.

Students will be evaluated by exam (midterm and final, totaling 30%), regular short quizzes and weekly pencil-and-paper or small programming homework problems (40% together), and the group project (30%).

FAQ

Should I take this course?

Yes, if:

• you're a CS student interested in languages, language technology, or information processing
• you're a CS student who needs an "applications" credit
• you're a language technology minor (this course is an elective option)
• you're a linguistics student who can write computer programs (this course is an elective option)
• you always suspected natural language was kind of like Lisp (or Java or ...)
• you want computers to take over the world
• you don't want computers to take over the world, but if they do, you want to negotiate your release
• you like AI, machine learning, and/or theoretical computer science, and want to apply them to a hard real-world problem

Related courses elsewhere (not exhaustive!)

University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, University of Colorado, Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, University of Utah, University of Wisconsin-Madison