[This course is not being offered this year (2005-2006). It may be offered next year.]

Description

This course aims to provide students with the knowledge and skills needed to use computational techniques to facilitate linguistic research. The course introduces the computer representation of linguistic data, the construction of linguistic databases, ways of searching for and extracting information of interest, and ways of generating useful displays of the results.

Topics covered include:

• the representation of text on computers: multilingual character encoding, mark-up schemes, means of converting among representations
• regular expressions and their use in searching
• context free grammars
• basic parsing techniques
• properties and uses of databases
• approaches to annotation
• sorting as a tool for searching and organizing data

Although much of the content of the course may be useful to those interested in linguistic technology, the focus of the course is on the use of computational tools to facilitate linguistic research that is traditional in the sense that its goals are to understand language.

While some background in computing will be useful, none is assumed. Since much of the course is devoted to the use of tools originating in the Unix environment and exemplifies the Unix philosophy of combining multiple tools rather than using large, monolithic programs, the course provides an introduction to the Unix environment. The course includes an introduction to programming in Python.

Information on topics covered by this course may be found here