LING3105: Language and Computers

The widening use of computers and the internet in the past four decades has profoundly influenced the way people communicate, search for, and store information. For the vast majority of individuals and situations, the vehicle for this information is natural language. As a result, the development of applications that are able to effectively process natural language has become extremely important, and the use of such applications has become a part of our daily lives. Whenever you do a Google search, empty your spam folder, speak to Siri or Alexa, are shown targeted ads, or interact with an AI-based customer service agent on a phone or website, you are interacting with natural language technology. In this course, you will explore the fundamentals of how computers are used to represent, process, and organize textual and spoken information, how this knowledge can be used to enrich our lives, and its potential pitfalls. We will cover both the theory and practice of human language technology, grounding abstract concepts in real-world examples and developing basic skills in formal and computational analysis. Topics include: why human language is a hard problem for computers, text encoding, search, text classification, forensic linguistics, language models?small and large?and the social, ethical, and even environmental implications of language technology. The course will be split between lectures, which will cover the fundamentals of computational thinking, and class discussions in which we will explore the social contexts and consequences of these technologies. The course assumes no background knowledge in linguistics or computer science and does not require any specific mathematical or programming background. Each unit/lecture will be entirely self-contained, providing the necessary linguistic, computational, and mathematical background as needed.

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