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LING/C SC/PSYC 408/508
Computational Techniques for Linguists
Fall 2025

This is a introductory course to computers and general programming useful for linguists (and non-engineers). Topics include Linux and the Terminal (Shell usage and programming), Python and web technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and Apache2. A term project is required.

Textbook

No textbook is required. All reading material will be made available online

Software

All software used in this class will be freely available.
Students will be expected to install virtualized Ubuntu (Linux) on their computers for programming use, e.g. via Microsoft's Windows Sub-system for Linux (WSL), Apple's macOS, or some bare-metal Linux.

Instructor: Sandiway Fong sandiway@arizona.edu
Office: Douglass 311 (send email for an appointment or take a chance and drop by before/after class)

Administrivia

Location Education, Rm 308
Time Tuesdays/Thursdays 2 - 3:15PM

Syllabus

See lecture1 slides.

Lecture Notes

Available in Adobe PDF and Microsoft Powerpoint .pptx formats.

August

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides		 Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint
8/26 lecture1.pdf lecture1.pptx 25 Viewer Administrivia (Syllabus) and Introduction:
Natural Language processing tools: Syntactic parsers, Google n-grams, and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK).
The fundamental nature of computation: the Turing Machine, Busy Beavers example.
8/28 lecture2.pdf lecture2.pptx 24 Viewer Binary and hexadecimal. Computer vs. Human Brain. Machine Language. Parallelism and supercomputers. Integers and 2's complement arithmetic. Binary Coded Decimal (BCD). Floating point numbers.
Homework 1

September

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides		 Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint
9/2 lecture3.pdf lecture3.pptx 26 Viewer Homework 1 review. Character representation: ASCII and Unicode. HTML5 and Unicode.
pokemon.html / pokemon2.html / pokemon3.html
9/4 lecture4.pdf lecture4.pptx 13 Viewer Homework 2. Installing Ubuntu as a guest operating system on your Windows 11 machine.
Recommend installing Microsoft's Windows Sub-system for Linux 2 (WSL2).
(Older: VirtualBox (vbox) for Intel/AMD x86 machines only.)
Navigating around the hierarchical file system: pwd, cd, ~, .., .
Text editor: nano.
sudo prefix, rm
Checking the Ubuntu version, Tk graphics with Python, and Pip (package manager).
Terminal log: terminal4.txt (commands typed in today's lecture)
9/9 lecture5.pdf lecture5.pptx 19 Viewer Terminal commands. The Bash shell.
Control-D, what it means. Control-G, ringing the bell.
The bc calculator.
Shell variables. Shell commands. Directories and files. Shell arithmetic using expr and ((...)).
PS1 prompt customization.
.bashrc editing using nano.
A first shell program using for-do-done.
Terminal log: terminal5.txt
9/11 lecture6.pdf lecture6.pptx 23 Viewer The cat command. chmod for permissions.
Bash shell programming. test.
Asking for Shell input using read -p. if-then-else/elif-fi.
[macOS note: zsh doesn't like -p. Type bash at the zsh command line to enter the Bash shell.]
Homework 3: Bash shell exercises. Useful word commands: wc, tr, sort, and uniq.
Note: Windows files can be accessed/copied to Ubuntu from /mnt/c
File: text.txt
Terminal log: terminal6.txt
9/16 lecture7.pdf lecture7.pptx 23 Viewer Homework 3 review.
The spirit of Unix: piping commands together to do powerful things!
Useful: tail. awk. termgraph: ASCII graphics.
A note on file permissions: chmod binary pattern for rwx.
Terminal log: terminal7.txt
9/18 lecture8.pdf lecture8.pptx 24 Panopto crashed, no video The calculator bc revisited: scale, obase, arbitrary precision pi and e.
Bash command substitution: two ways. Positional parameters $n. If-test: [...] and [[...]]].
Homework 4: writing a Bash shell script.
File: test.sh / test2.sh / test3.sh
Terminal log: terminal8.txt
9/23 lecture9.pdf lecture9.pptx 19 Viewer Talk tomorrow @ 4pm on linguistic theory.
Homework 4 Review.
Bash shell: suffix and prefix deletion, string maninpulation, loops, positional parameters and globbing.
Example programs:
line30.sh
cmd.sh
rmext.sh
Terminal log: terminal9.txt
9/25 lecture10.pdf lecture10.pptx 28 Viewer Final lecture on Bash shell programming.
Example exercises:
(1) file deletion,
(2) double-spacing,
(3) non-blank lines only, and
(4) using find and sed.
Example programs:
rm.sh
doublespace.sh
doublespace2.sh
nonblank.sh
Terminal log: terminal10.txt
9/30 lecture11.pdf lecture11.pptx 33 Viewer Upcoming talk on Generative Linguistics and Generative AI. Oct 10th.
The frontend: an introduction to html5. Html, css and javascript.
What is hypertext? Client-side vs. server-side. HTML tags. URL format. IMG. Embedded images using base64. Text element tags. Preformatted blocks. Turning on debugging in the browser: Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox.
Ungraded Homework Exercise.
Sample file: mypage.html
Terminal log: terminal11.txt

October

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides		 Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint
10/2 lecture12.pdf lecture12.pptx 19 Viewer More html tags.
X11 colors. History of X11.
UTF-8 and the meta tag.
Introduction to CSS: inline style. Tabs.
Homework 5
Example html file used in class: mypage2.html
10/7 lecture13.pdf lecture13.pptx 25 Viewer Javascript. Console in browser.
document.write(string), document.getElementById(ID).innerHTML,
console.log(string).
Tic-tac-toe example.
Javascript variables, and numbers (64-bit floats).
Random number generation using Math.random().
File: sample.html
File: sample2.html
File: sample3.html
10/9 lecture14.pdf lecture14.pptx 26 Viewer Javascript strings, operators, if-else, switch-case, for/while loops.
Tic Tac Toe example contd.
File: sample3.html
File: sample4.html
File: sample5.html
File: sample6.html
File: sample7.html
Homework 6: making the game playable, step-by-step!
Note: extended due date!
10/14 lecture15.pdf lecture15.pptx 24 Viewer A note on Homework 6: setTimeout() and the event loop.
Some Term Project Ideas: using the grid and others.
Forms and Javascript: File: inputtext.html
File: inputcheckbox.html
File: select.html
File: radio.html
Example: BMI Gauge animated display (using Javascript)
File: bmi-gauge.html
File: gaugeSVG.js
Slides updated: 4:15pm
10/16 lecture16.pdf lecture16.pptx 19 Viewer Homework help: 2nd half of lecture.
Example: BMI Gauge animated display (using Javascript) revisited.
File: bmi-gauge.html
File: gaugeSVG.js
Example:random number generator File: justgage.js
File: counter.html
10/21 lecture17.pdf lecture17.pptx 26 Viewer Homework 6 Review.
Extra: "Smart" 3D Tic Tac Toe.
Installing and configuring the Apache2 webserver on macOS and Ubuntu: start/stop service, DocumentRoot, and UserDir.
IP lookup. IPv6 and IPv4. Geolocation.

File: sample-index.html
Terminal log: terminal17.txt
Slides updated: 3:25pm
10/23 lecture18.pdf lecture18.pptx 26 Viewer Installing and configuring the Apache2 webserver on macOS and Ubuntu platforms contd.
Homework 7
10/28 lecture19.pdf lecture19.pptx 24 Viewer Homework 7 review
cgi-bin (Common Gateway Interface) setup on macOS and Ubuntu.
An Example using HTML/Javascript: diskspace.cgi.
Command: df -g.
Use of awk to extract information from df.
File: test.cgi (Download linked file as...)
File: diskspace.cgi (Download linked file as...)
File: canvasjs.min.js (Javascript widget)

Terminal log: terminal19.txt
Slides updated: 4pm
10/30 lecture20.pdf lecture20.pptx 29 Viewer Running a cgi-bin program from inside your home directory.
Worked example: CMU pronouncing dictionary run in Perl.
File: cmudict.cgi (Download linked file as...)

November

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides		 Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint
11/4 lecture21.pdf lecture21.pptx 36 Viewer Announcement: class schedule for the remainder of the semester
Why Python? Examples of what you can do with Python + nltk
Python numbers.
Homework 9: install Python 3.
NEW! for Windows 11, Python Install Manager.
Terminal log: terminal21.txt
11/6 lecture22.pdf lecture22.pptx 26 Viewer Homework 10: Install nltk and nltk data.
More on Python: range() and use in calculating compound interest.
Type coercion: converting numbers and strings.
Function def. yield and return.
Formatted output, e.g. print('format string'.format()).
Strings and lists: indexability and mutability.
Command line arguments: sys.arg list.
File: futval.py
File: futval2.py
File: futval3.py
Terminal log: terminal22.txt
11/11 Viewer Veterans Day - no classes
11/13 lecture23.pdf lecture23.pptx 20 Viewer Python and text. Exercises. for-loop and list comprehension. Functions sum() and mean().
nltk.corpus.gutenberg.words(). nltk.FreqDist() and .plot().
set()
Files: open(), .read(), .readline(), .readlines().
Terminal log: terminal23.txt
11/18 lecture24.pdf lecture24.pptx 22 Viewer .word_tokenize(), .pos_tag().
Penn Treebank POS tagset.
treebank.parsed_sents(), .draw().
.chunk.ne_chunk()
.concordance(), .similar(), .common_contexts()
Homework 11.
Terminal log: terminal24.txt
11/20 lecture25.pdf lecture25.pptx 28 Viewer def lex_diversity(), eval().
Importing your own corpus: an example using Project Gutenberg.
text.findall(r"... pattern ...")
String methods: word.startswith(string), word.endswith(string), word.istitle().
Terminal log: terminal25.txt
11/25 lecture26.pdf lecture26.pptx 19 Viewer Solving an encoding mystery: Latin-1 vs. UFT8.
Sentence tokenization: nltk.sent_tokenize(string). Literary Style: Stream of consciousness and nltk. Mrs. Dalloway vs. Brown Fiction. matplotlib bar charting.
11/27 Viewer Thanksgiving - no classes

December

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides		 Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint
12/2 Viewer Term Project
12/4 Viewer Term Project
12/9 Viewer Term Project

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Last modified: Tue Nov 4 18:38:27 MST 2025