Course details

8.3001

Introduction to Computational Linguistics

 L
SS 2023 Dr. Elia Bruni Hybrid
4h/wk
8 ECTS 		B.Sc modules:
CS-BP-CL - (Computational) Linguistics
KOGW-PM-CL - Computational Linguistics

CS-BW - Bachelor elective course
CS-MW - Master elective course 		Tue: 12-14
Wed: 8-10

Our ability to use natural language to communicate with each other and to record information is one of the main features that makes us intelligent. However, while we use language effortlessly in our everyday life, computers have a hard time processing natural languages such as English or German. Computational linguistics is a subfield of artificial intelligence at the interface of linguistic theory and computer science, which aims at endowing computers with the ability to process natural language. The ultimate goal is to develop artificial agents that can automatically acquire information from text or that can communicate with humans via intelligent interfaces or in human-robot interaction. This course introduces students to some of the core topics in computational linguistics and natural language processing. The course covers the following key topics in language processing at an introductory level: - Formal languages and automata - Syntactic structure and syntactic parsing - Logic-based compositional semantics - Word meaning and semantic similarity - Distributional semantics and word embeddings - Neural models for language processing - Neural machine translation - Neural dialogue modelling - Language games