CSCE 415/815 Computational Linguistics
Time: 10:30 -11:20 MWF
Room: Avery Hall 119
Credits: 3 units
Instructor: Peter Revesz
Fundamentals of language modeling, parsing, machine translation, computational and statistical methods in comparative linguistics, laws of phonological change and language evolution, language families and script families, ancient scripts, computational methods for script comparison and the analysis of script evolution.
Textbooks(s) and/or Other Required Materials:
The following book is recommended: Peter Revesz, ed., Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, 2024. This and other books will be available on reserve.
Prerequisites: Standing of junior class or above; one of CSCE 310, CSCE 311, SOFT 260 or permission of instructor.
Course Objectives:
Mastery:
a. Language modeling and parsing techniques.
b. Computational analysis of phonological change in languages.
c. Computational methods in comparative linguistics including the automated identification of cognate words and the reconstruction of protowords in language families.
Familiarity: History and methods of the decipherment of ancient scripts. Sign recognition algorithms.
Exposure: Machine translation and deep learning.
Lecture Topics Covered:
1. Major topics and current trends in computational linguistics.
2. Morphology, syntax, context-free and context-sensitive grammars.
3. Parse trees and parsing algorithms.
4. Phonetics, vowel harmony and regular sound changes.
5. Automatic identification of regular sound changes.
6. Vowel harmony testing algorithms.
7. The evolution of languages and language families.