LIN340H5 • Computing with Natural Language

How is a search engine able to answer so many of your questions? Why does your phone know which word you're about to type next in your message? Such technologies rely on computational linguistics, the intersection of Linguistics and the Computing Sciences. In this course, students with a background in either discipline will be introduced to this field. The course has a practical focus: how to get computers to analyze and process natural language? Through lectures and scaffolded programming assignments, students will be introduced to the tools and resources of Computational Linguistics (and their limitations). We will look at techniques used by computational linguists to process large amounts of text to answer practical and theoretical research questions. Topics may include part of speech tagging, parsing, machine translation, sentiment analysis, visualization, and corpus linguistics. While no programming skills are required at the outset, students should expect to develop them through the practicums of the course.

[(LIN100Y5 or (LIN101H5 and LIN102H5)) and any 200-level LIN course] or [(CSC108H5 and CSC148H5) and any 200-level CSC course]
Humanities
12L/24P
In Class
Linguistics