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Language and Computation (UNIB20005)
Undergraduate level 2Points: 12.5Not available in 2017
Overview
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AIMS
Language is the chief manifestation of human intelligence. Through language we express basic needs and lofty aspirations, technical know-how and flights of fantasy. Ideas are shared over great separations of distance and time. Thanks to this richness, the study of language is part of many disciplines including linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, law, literary criticism, hermeneutics, cryptanalysis, speech pathology, forensics and digital signal processing. In computer science, a long-standing challenge has been to build intelligent machines. The holy grail of artificial intelligence, enshrined in the "Turing Test", is to construct an automatic dialogue system that is so adept with language that humans cannot tell it apart from another human.
As fields of inquiry, Language and Computation exist on opposing sides of the divide between the Humanities and the Sciences. However, their history and future are closely intertwined. In the early 1900's, a research program to reconstruct mathematical reasoning using logic led to the notion of language as a formal system amenable to automatic processing, and thence to the development of computer languages. Looking to the future, society faces a huge technological challenge of accessing knowledge from the veritable ocean of textual information that inundates our lives.
INDICATIVE CONTENT
This subject offers students across the University with a range of resources for understanding the formal structure and interpretation of language, and how language can be manipulated intelligently by machines. Students will appreciate linguistic structure at two vastly different levels: the isolated sentence, and the terabytes of text on the web. Topics include: fundamental concepts in the structure and interpretation of sentences, the philosophy of language, applications of information theory, and the limits of machine intelligence
Intended learning outcomes
INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES (ILO)
On completion of this subject, students should be able to analyze the structure and content of natural language texts using formal techniques from logic, linguistics and computer science.
Generic skills
On completion of this subject students should:
- Be able to think critically and to organise information in clear and precise ways
- Have improved skills in formal reasoning
- Be proficient in cross-disciplinary techniques
- Have developed experience and skills in working in a group
- Be able to synthesise informaiton and communicate results effectively.
Last updated: 22 March 2024