1. Computational Linguistics @ UIUC
Roxana Girju
Student Orientation
August 22, 2013

2. 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;

3. 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 curbing the information on the Internet.

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

5. 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.

6. Semantic Frontiers Group
(Beckman #2043)
Our goal is to investigate computational natural language semantic and pragmatic models for intelligent information access.
We work on key applications of human language technology:
Machine Translation,
Discourse Processing,
Semantics and Tagging,
Social Media,
Biomedical information Extraction, and
Automatic Question Answering.
And more !

7. Semantic Frontiers Group
Some recent computational projects:
“Multi-dialect phrase-based speech recognition and machine translation for Qatari broadcast TV”.
National Priorities Research Program (NPRP), Qatar National Research Fund,
with M. Hasegawa-Johnson, E. Benmamaoun, Rehab Duwairi, Eiman Mustafawi
Students: Chen Li, Rania Al-Sabbah
“Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant”.
The US Department of Education
with a large group from Dept. of Education and CS
Students: David Lundgren
“A Text-to-Scene Conversion and Visualization System for Car Accident Reports”
State Farm
Students: Chen Li, Brandon Beamer, Rania Al-Sabbagh
“Image-to-text conversion for large image search”
Google Inc.

8. CL: Courses Offered
LING402 Tools and Techniques for Speech and Language Processing
LING270 Language, Technology and Society
LING406 Introduction to Computational Linguistics
LING591 – Special Topics in Computational Linguistics.

9. ADVANCED STUDY IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING AT UIUC
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.

10. Thank you!
For more information: Roxana Girju,