LING 538: Computational Linguistics
Introduction to symbolic and analytic methods for computational linguistics: regular expressions, finite state automata, and context-free grammars. Programming in Perl, Python, and Prolog.
Instructor: Daniel Brenner
Term: Spring
Location: Online
Course Overview
This graduate-level course introduces symbolic and analytic concepts, tools, and methods for working with natural language in computational systems. It complements the introductory Statistical NLP course (LING 539).
Topics
Using the Chomsky Hierarchy as a framework:
- Regular languages — regular grammars, regular expressions, and finite-state automata
- Context-free languages — context-free grammars
- Programming — Perl, Python, and Prolog for computational linguistics
- Parsing — applying these tools to realistic language data
This course prepares students for LING 581: Advanced Computational Linguistics.
Textbook
Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky & Martin (draft available online).