Academic Assessment & Planning Center 2010-11

Institutional Course Syllabus for ENG 270

Prince Sultan University

ENGLISH

2nd Semester 2013-14

COURSE OUTLINE

Course Code : ENG 270 Pre-requisite: English linguistics

Course Title : Introduction to Computational Linguistics

Credit Hours : 2 Credit Hours Instructor:

I. Course Description: This course aims to introduce the students from various disciplines to the field of Computational Linguistics. Computational Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which focuses on the use of computers to process or produce human language (also known as 'natural language', to distinguish it from computer languages). To this field, linguistics contributes an understanding of the special properties of language data, and provides theories and descriptions of language structure and use. Computer Science contributes theories and techniques for designing and implementing computer systems. In this course apart from the theory, the students will be made to get familiar with the already available language processing tools like POS taggers, Morph Analyzers, Parsers, and systems like Machine Translation.

II. Course Objectives:

At the end of the course, the student is expected to understand how computers understand and process language as we do.

Knowledge
Have linguistic background

Cognitive Skills

Understand and be able to analyze natural languages

Interpersonal Skills & Responsibility

Participate in classroom discussions
Numerical & Communication Skills
Use basic information & computer technology in language understanding

III. Course Content

Topics / No. of Weeks / Contact Hours
1. Introduction – Goal of CL, CL and its relation with other disciplines, History, Levels of language processing, some CL applications and tools – spelling and grammar checkers, text to speech and speech recognition tools, search engines, machine translation system / 4 / 8
2. Morphology / 1 / 2
3. Morphological analyzers / 1 / 2
4. Regular expressions / 2 / 4
5. Text segmentation / 1 / 4
6 Stemming / 2 / 2
7. Natural Language Processing / 2 / 4

IV. Course Components

Component / Contact Hours / Contact Hours within semester for 13 teaching weeks
Lecture / 2 / 26

V. Teaching Strategies

Domain / Strategy
Knowledge / Lectures
Cognitive Skills / Quizzes
Interpersonal Skills & Responsibility / Individual assignments
Numerical & Communication Skills / Group discussions

VI. Course Requirements

- Regular attendance

- Assignments, quizzes

- Group discussions and presentations

- Majors and Final examination

VII. Office Hours

Sunday: 10am– 12pm

VIII. Student Assessment

A. Assessment Task

Domain / Assessment Task
Knowledge / Midterm and Final exam
Cognitive Skills / Quiz
Interpersonal Skills & Responsibility / Individual assignments/ exercises
Numerical & Communication Skills / Group discussions

B. Schedule of Assessment

Assessment / Assessment Task / Proportion of Final Assessment
1 / Assignments/exercises/quiz / attendance / 35%
2 / Midterm / 25%
3 / Final / 40%

v No make-up/late exams will be held at any condition. All students must write the exam on the scheduled date.

v If a student arrives 10 minutes late to the class, she will be marked absent for the hour.

IX. Learning Resources

A. References

Title / Author / Publisher
Essential reference / Lecture Handouts / Instructor
Recommended book / Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition / Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin / Pearson Education Inc.
Recommended book / Natural Language Understanding / James Allen / Benjamin/Cummings

Best of Luck!

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

~Les Brown