About

This site contains materials for Introduction to Computational Linguistics–a course given by Aaron Steven White at the University of Rochester.

About the course

This course covers foundational concepts in computational linguistics. Major focus is placed on the use of formal languages as a tool for understanding natural language as well as on developing students’ ability to implement foundational algorithms pertaining to those formal languages. Topics include basic formal language theory, finite state phonological and morphological parsing, and syntactic parsing for context free grammars and mildly context sensitive formalisms.

Prerequisites

This course relies on concepts covered in an introductory linguistics course and an introductory programming course. With respect to the latter, it specifically assumes that you can competently write scripts that do non-trivial things and can work competently with Python’s object-oriented programming facilities but maybe not develop a package on your own.

About the instructor

Aaron Steven White is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Rochester, where he directs the Formal and Computational Semantics lab (FACTS.lab). His research investigates the relationship between linguistic expressions and conceptual categories that undergird the human ability to convey information about possible past, present, and future configurations of things in the world.

In addition to being a principal investigator on numerous federally funded grants and contracts, White is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. His work has appeared in a variety linguistics, cognitive science, and natural language processing venues, including Semantics & Pragmatics, Glossa, Language Acquisition, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Psychology, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

About the site

The site itself is built using Quarto. The source files for this site are available on github at aaronstevenwhite/intro-to-cl. See Installation for information on how to run the code documented here.

Acknowledgments

The development of these materials was supported by the University of Rochester and a National Science Foundation grant: CAREER: Logical Form Induction (BCS/IIS-2237175).

License Creative Commons License

Introduction to Computational Linguistics by Aaron Steven White is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://github.com/aaronstevenwhite/intro-to-cl.