Lecture Materials for Language & Technology (LIN 120)

This repository hosts the public lecture materials for Language & Technology (LIN 120) at Stony Brook University. If you are a Stony Brook instructor, you can also get access to the private repository, which contains quizzes, assessments, and other grading materials.

Language & Technology is a very basic introduction to computational linguistics and language technology. Students learn about

• chatbots, the Turing test and the Loebner prize, and
• n-gram models and their applications for culturomics, stylistic analysis, web search, and word prediction, among others, and
• the challenges of machine learning, and
• what positive and negative impact language technology has had and/or will have on society.

In addition, students master the basics of the programming language Python. This shows them that seemingly complex pieces of language technology often require little more than a few lines of code.

If you want to use these materials for self-study, you need

1. a PDF viewer for the lecture slides, and
2. an installation of the Jupyter notebook server to view the .ipynb-files in the notebooks folder. For details, see the file INSTALL.mdown in the notebooks folder.