Computational Linguistics @ UIUC Lane Schwartz lanes@illinois.edu Student Orientation August 18, 2016

Computational Linguistics  Artificial Intelligence Goal: to understand the nature of intelligence, to engineer systems that exhibit intelligence. AI labs: build systems / robots that mimic the human behavior / mind. MIT lab: vision, robotics, and natural language processing – keys to understand intelligence UIUC: NLP/CL, speech recognition, computer vision;

What is Computational Linguistics? area concerned with the creation of computer systems for the purpose of performing various NL tasks: Reading/writing a book Holding a conversation Machine Translation Searching for useful and hidden information BUT.. also an area in which computer systems are used to give insights into complex language issues Computational models of psycholinguistic processes Computational models of historical development Models of language acquisition Insights into second-language learning plays an increasing role in managing the information on the Internet.

Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing People @ UIUC Linguistics faculty: Roxana Girju – computational semantics & pragmatics, textual entailment, question answering, computational cognitive models / social computing, social media. Lane Schwartz – Human and machine translation, computational syntax/parsing Chilin Shih – Asian studies, corpus linguistics, speech processing Affiliates: Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (ECE): speech processing; pronunciation variability; prosody. Julia Hockenmaier (CS) –computationally tractable grammars for wide-coverage parsing; interface between natural language and vision. Dan Roth (CS) – machine learning and inference methods; disambiguation, shallow parsing, semantic role labeling, co-reference, question answering, textual entailment.

Why Study Computational Linguistics? To get a job in industry e.g., many current job listings are CL jobs Google Inc. Amazon Inc. 7 Inc., etc. To get a job in academia: as a computational linguist computational literacy and an understanding of computational methods will become critical in the next decade.

Computational Linguistics Labs @ UIUC A new Computational Linguistics Lab (in FLB) Semantic Frontiers Gourp http://compsem.ai.uiuc.edu/ Beckman #2043 Our goal is to investigate computational natural models for intelligent information access in one language and across languages. We work on key applications of human language technology: - Human and Machine Translation, Discourse Processing, Semantics and Tagging, Social Media, Biomedical information Extraction, Automatic Question Answering. And more !

Computational Linguistics: Courses Offered LING 402 –Tools and Techniques for Speech and Language Processing LING 270 – Language, Technology, and Society LING 406 – Introduction to Computational Linguistics LING 490 – Corpus Linguistics LING 490 – Human and Machine Translation (NEW!) LING 490 – Tools for Big Data (NEW!) LING 490 – Preparing for Career Success (NEW!) LING 506 – Special Topics in Computational Linguistics

Advanced Study in LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING (LSP) @ UIUC http://lsp.linguistics.illinois.edu/ LSP is a multidisciplinary program for doctoral students with an interest in speech and language processing technology. Is open to students who are pursuing a Ph.D. in the Departments of Linguistics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. students would earn a Certificate of Advanced Study in Language and Speech Processing, in addition to the Ph.D. students will take courses from a specified list, and work with a program-affiliated faculty member; faculty members affiliated with the program have appointments in one or more of the following departments: Linguistics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Library and Information Sciences.

Thank you! For more information: Roxana Girju, girju@illinois.edu and/or Lane Schwartz, lanes@illinois.edu