A COURSE IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING FOR LINGUISTS – CONCEPTION AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Abstract

Beyond its usual applications, information technologies offer a powerful and complementary approach to the study – both scientifically and practically – of human languages. The goal of the course is two-fold: to familiarize students in linguistics with the main types of language resources and tools, but also to teach them the basics of the design of such tools. As an example, a computational method is presented here for evaluating the phonological distance between words, fairly consistent with the perceptual data, as well as its application in the computer program TREFL for automatic generation of didactically useful associations between words.