• Bachelor of languages, elective course in the common course block
• available to students from other degree programmes

No specific pre-requisites.

Introduction to linguistics and phonetics.

After completing the course, you will be able to

• name techniques for encoding language
• manipulate text and other linguistic data sets
• summarise the main principles of applications that involve language technology such as tools for spelling correction, grammar checking, language learning, information retrieval, text classification, dialog systems and machine translation
• use basic command-line tools in a Unix environment
• carry-out a small empirical study on real-world data.

• first year

• autumn term, period I or II

The course provides an introduction to practical language technology including

• Technology for encoding languages
• Basic text processing tools
• Spelling correction and grammar checking
• Computer-aided language learning
• Information retrieval and text classification
• Dialog systems and automatic question answering
• Machine translation

The course also provides information of tools and interfaces that support linguistic research and practical applications including a brief introduction to Unix environments and command-line tools.

• Markus Dickinson, Chris Brew and Detmar Meurers. Language and computers. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013
• additional reading and online material.

• lectures featuring guest speakers
• online reading material, videos, quizzes
• optional lab sessions and tutorials supporting the practical assignments
• individual project work
• peer support (discussion forum, F.A.Q.)
• documentation of activities via Moodle
• regular course feedback

• online exercises including weekly quizzes and practical assignments
• final individual project
• standard grading scale (0–5).

• online course
• individual reading and online exercises
• possible contact teaching in the form of lectures, lab sessions and tutorials
• may include online exams, peer-reviewed tests, quizzes and writing of a term paper.