Introduction to Computational Linguistics (Master S1 Class)

Basic information

• Credits: 3
• Format: 2 hours weekly
• 2026-2027 instructors: Benoît Crabbé
• 2026-2027 schedule: Thursdays, 09:30-11:30, room 064E (Halle aux farines)
• Moodle page

Description

This class introduces to computational linguistics at large. Computational linguistics shares with Natural Language Processing similar methods but different goals. This class will introduce these shared foundations such as word embeddings and language models to the audience before addressing classical Natural Language Processing problems like machine translation, information retrieval, question answering, chatbots and dialogue. The class will also provide introduction to traditional topics in computational linguistics such as syntactic and semantic parsing, models of coreference and discourse and computational cognitive models of sentence processing.

Prerequisites

Fluency with command line from a scripting programming language such as python or R will help.

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this course, students should:

• know the current state of the main areas of computational linguistics and their current limits
• be able to critically compare methods used in computational linguistics
• be able to use day to day tools from computational linguistics and use them critically