Course: LING 455. Computational Linguistics (3)
Prerequisite: Upper division standing. This is an intensive seminar on computational data processing in linguistics. While computers have no minds of their own, researchers are increasingly able to harness computational methods to understand natural language, which is often ‘messy’ and unpredictable. The focus of this course is the creation of working computer code that can help us answer questions about language by accessing resources from basic corpora (e.g., structured narratives like fables or news stories) to social media. No specialized knowledge of computer science is necessary. The skills learned in this class will be useful for undertaking research in linguistics and the social sciences, as well as for performing data analytics on text corpora. Available for graduate credit.