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Course Descriptions

The Summer 2008 program is no longer accepting applications Single courses may be available Next program starts: Summer 2009 Details will be posted in Winter Program location: Online; local students also have option to attend on-site class sessions Sign up to receive e-mail updates >> Contact a program representative >>

Interested in taking a single class? Some courses (designated by a below) may be open on a space-available basis to professionals who are not seeking the certificate. See Single-Course Enrollment for details.

Linguistics 570 and 571 (see below) can provide you with graduate credit that can be applied to the Master's Program in Computational Linguistics should you decide to apply to the degree at a later time.

Summer Course

Linguistics 473: Computational Linguistics Foundations 

Schedule: Tuesdays and Thursdays, July 24 - Sept. 11, 2008, 4:30 - 6:15 p.m. (Pacific Time); $1,890.
Instructor: TBD

Computational linguistics builds on the theory and practice of multiple fields (linguistics, computer science, and statistics) to design computer applications that involve the automatic processing of natural language speech or text by machines. This course is intended to reinforce the most important skills from contributing disciplines to prepare such students for further study in computational linguistics.

Topics covered include:

• UNIX and server cluster usage
• Probability and statistics (random variables and random vectors; conditional, joint, and marginal probabilities; the chain rule; Bayes' rule; independence and conditional dependence)
• Formal grammars and languages (Chomsky hierarchy, regular expressions and regular languages, context-free grammar, and other grammar formalisms)
• Finite-state automata and transducers
• A quick review of algorithms and data structures

How to sign up for individual enrollment in this course

Autumn Course

Linguistics 570: Shallow Processing Methods for Natural Language Processing 

Schedule: Mondays and Wednesdays, Sept. 24 - Dec. 10, 2008, 4:30 - 5:45 p.m. (Pacific Time); $2,570
Instructor: William Lewis, Microsoft Corp.

Techniques and algorithms for associating relatively surface-level structures and information with natural language corpora, including:

• Part-of-Speech and constituent structure tagging
• Morphological analysis
• Preprocessing/segmentation
• Named entity recognition
• Chunk parsing
• Word-sense disambiguation
• Linguistic resources that can be leveraged for these tasks (e.g., WordNet)

These techniques allow you to locate items of interest (e.g., product names, diagnoses, proper names) in running text, correlate their occurrences with each other, and normalize text for further processing.

How to sign up for individual enrollment in this course

Winter Course

Linguistics 571: Deep Processing Methods for Natural Language Processing 

Schedule: Mondays and Wednesdays, Jan. 5 - March 11, 2009, 3:30 - 4:45 p.m. (Pacific Time); $2,520
Instructor: Scott Farrar, Visiting Professor, UW

Deep linguistic processing aims to extract meaning from natural language text in machine readable form. Deep linguistic processing is useful in applications that require precise identification of the relationships between entities and/or the precise meaning of the author, such as automated customer service response and machine reading for expert systems. Deep linguistic processing is also essential to the creation of natural language dialogue systems, which allow computers to understand and reply in natural language.

This course covers algorithms for using precision grammars to associate deep or elaborated linguistic structures with naturally occurring linguistic data (parsing), and to associate natural language strings with input semantic representations (generation). It also covers associated techniques for disambiguation (parse, generated string) and transfer (for symbolic machine translation).

How to sign up for individual enrollment in this course