This undergraduate class looks at everyday tasks that involve natural language processing: document classification, spelling and grammar correction, dialogue systems, machine translation, cryptography and forensic linguistics. Students will get insight into how these systems work (and why it is still so difficult to do natural language processing well). We also consider social and ethical considerations such as privacy, job creation and loss due to language technologies, and the nature of machine intelligence.

Textbook: Markus Dickinson, Chris Brew, and Detmar Meurers: Language and Computers Wiley-Blackwell (2013)

Additional required readings will be made available for download from the course website.