CMPU-366: Computational Linguistics
Spring 2020
Contact Information
| Professor: | Nancy Ide |
| Office: | SP 104.6 |
| Office Hours: | MW 11:00-12:00 and by appointment |
| Phone: | 437 5988 |
| Email: | ide [at] cs.vassar.edu |
Course Coordinates
| Time (when) | MW 12:00-1:15pm |
| Space (where) | SP 309 |
| Cyberspace | http://www.cs.vassar.edu/courses/cs366/top |
Course Description
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 course, you will learn how computers can do useful things with human languages, such as translate from English into Japanese, summarize a magazine article into a few sentences, find the main topics in the day's news, and analyze prevailing opinions about a given topic on Twitter. 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 which have been applied to analyze large bodies of language data (such as the web). You will learn the basics of probabilistic analysis and how to use them in machine learning.