Language x Tech: Getting Started with Computational Linguistics

[@michaelb247]

Apparently the story goes that the impetus behind the development of computational linguistics was the fact that during the cold war, the USA experienced a paucity of spies that could speak English and Russian. It occured to someone when computers came along - why not get a computer to do it - machine translation, surely all one does is substitute one word for another - a simple pattern matching process, so the data (the words) would be substitued one word for another and that data arranged to refect the grammar of either language, for example the sentence "The black cat" in Spanish is "El gato negro" which translates as 'The cat black' so your coding has to contain the ability to arrange the syntax so thatv in English the adjective goes before the noun, in SPanish the adsjective is placed after the noun - easy peasy. But the scientists soon ran into trouble when they sought to translate more metaphoric language, so they tried it on Shakespeare and they tried the phrase "The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak" and the translaton into Russian came back as "The meat is fine but the vodka is rubbish" and when the phrase "The hydraulic ram" came back as "The water goat"

[@mayssadkhil2718]

thank you sm for this

[@zptro6316]

good talk, I'm interested in pivoting from hum drum software development

[@fatemehkf5066]

I really got confused. Can someone help me? Does it necessary to have computer degree for studing computational linguistic as a Master student?

[@horaciozini5446]

Depends of the country and the master career. Here in argentina some masters are availed for people with ANY +4 years degree

[@michaelb247]

No, some universities offer BSc in Computational Linguistics, Manchester University used to offer it, I don't know if it still does. Almost any BSc in Artificial Intelligence will include an element of natural language processing. That being said Computational Linguistics is a speciality within Artificial Intelligence and more likely to be offered at masters level as a good understanding of the fundementals of AI. It also goes without saying that a familiarity with computer coding puts a student at an advantage, additonally of course, a good understanding of the elements of linguistics - eg, if one doesn't know what an adjective, verb etc is then you'll struggle

[@mihugong3153]

Thank you for this interesting talk. Maybe you could provide a link to the additional sources Etiene provies at the end of the video? I couldn't find it on her twitter .

[@tylerbraito8152]

Here's a link to her slide show: bia.unibz.it/esploro/outputs/conferencePresentation/Language-x-Tech-Getting-Started-with/991006186090501241