The topic of the course is language and computation: on the one hand we will see how linguistic intuitions can be formalized so as to implement computer programs. On the other we will dig into the cognitive plausibility of these computational models.

We will also discuss how to store in an appropriate format linguistic information (corpora) and how to query linguistic databases.

This course will provide you with theoretical and technical background to evaluate the advantages (and the limits) of a quantitative and qualitative approach to the language study.

The main topics that will be analyzed are the following ones:

- annotated corpora and lexical information;

- morpho-syntactic parsers;

- syntactic and semantic tagging;

- machine translation systems;

- (time permitting) language in the brain;

 

No programming experience is required. A strong interest/curiosity in (Generative) Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology is indeed requested.

A the end of the course, the student (possibly in group of maximum 3 people) should present a short project (20 minutes max) describing problems and advantages of an invented (artificial) device communicating in natural language with human in a precise scenario (to be defined by the student/group).