So much of our modern lives happens through computers, phones, and other electronic devices. The same is true of our language. How do computers shape our language, and how do we adapt computers to our language use? This class considers a range of topics connecting language and computers, including speech recognition systems (Alexa, Siri, Google …
Monthly Archives: November 2022
Ling 354: Week 6
[This is extracted from the Spring 2022 version on Canvas, so some links/formatting may be broken.] This week, we’re digging deeper into spell checking and language models. We’ll focus on simple models first, like n-grams, which we talked about at the end of class. That will require us to spend a little time talking about …
Ling 354: Week 5
[This is extracted from the Spring 2022 version on Canvas, so some links/formatting may be broken.] This week, we’re building on last week’s core ideas about speech recognition. We’ll start by discussing biases in speech recognition and how to overcome them, based on the Scientific American article as well as two others I’m posting here on machine …
Ling 354: Week 4
[This is extracted from the Spring 2022 version on Canvas, so some links/formatting may be broken.] This week, we’re turning to speech recognition. How do Alexa, Siri, Google, and other voice-activated assistants work? What causes difficulties for them, and how can we overcome them? For that matter, how does human speech recognition work? Why do …
Ling 354: Week 3
[This is extracted from the Spring 2022 version on Canvas, so some links/formatting may be broken.] In our Week 3 meeting, we’ll first wrap up emoji, including digging a bit deeper into how deeply we share our understanding of emoji. We’ll then turn to the QWERTY effect, research that argues that the ways we type …
Ling 354: Week 2
[This is extracted from the Spring 2022 version on Canvas, so some links/formatting may be broken.] In our Week 2 meeting (Feb 3), we’ll first wrap up writing systems and Unicode. Then we’ll be looking into the implications of getting languages onto computers, including ways that computerized language may support or impede certain languages’ use …
Ling 354: Week 1
[This is extracted from the Spring 2022 version on Canvas, so some links/formatting may be broken.] In our Week 1 meeting (Jan 27), we’ll be looking at the world’s writing systems, and how they can be encoded into a format for computers to use. Textbook reading The textbook reading for Week 1 is Ch. 1.1-1.3. This …