Language and Computers

Instructor: Markus Dickinson

• Office: ICC 452
• Phone: 687-5753
• E-mail: m!a#d$8%7 AT georgetown DOT edu (remove funny characters)

Days: Mondays and Wednesdays

Time: 4:15pm-5:30pm

Location: St. Mary's (STM) G40 on Mondays; ICC 106 on Wednesdays

Syllabus: To see the preliminary syllabus for spring 2007, click here. The syllabus will contain links to course notes, homeworks, etc.

Description of topics: click here

• You will learn a lot of interesting stuff and will be applying this knowledge to real-world situations.

• We'll go behind the scenes of internet search engines, automatic translators, e-mail filters, spell-checkers, and much more, to find out how people are using insights about language to improve a lot of the technology out there.

• Open to all students in good standing with Georgetown University

• There are no prerequisites.

• There will be weekly homeworks, a midterm, and a final.

• You will be required to use the internet quite a bit.

• Machine translation: How well can computers really translate from one language into another?

• E-mail filtering: How can language technology help keep junk e-mail out of my inbox?

• Spell checking: How smart is my spell checker?

• Speech recognition: When will I be able to use ordinary language to talk to my car, video and television?

• Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Can computer programs help me seem like a native speaker of a foreign language?

• and more ...

For a more thorough listing of material to be covered, check out the course topics