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LING/C SC/PSYC 438/538
Computational Linguistics
Fall 2026

This is a introductory course in computational linguistics at an advanced level. No pre-requisites for graduate students, we will learn the rudiments of programming and the theoretical underpinnings of grammar systems from scratch.

Reference Textbook

Optional: Speech and Language Processing 2nd edition, by D. Jurafsky and J.H. Martin, Prentice-Hall 2008. Or 3rd edition PDF.

Software

All software used in this class will be freely available.
We will use Python, Perl and SWI-Prolog as programming languages.
The instructor reserves the right to ask students to install additional software necessary to do some homework exercises.

Instructor: Sandiway Fong sandiway@arizona.edu
Office: Douglass 308 (send email for an appointment or take a chance and drop by before class)

Administrivia

Location Social Sciences, Rm 411
Time Tuesdays/Thursdays 3:30PM - 4:45PM

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
8/25 lecture1.pdf lecture1.pptx 39 Part 1: Viewer / Part 2: Viewer Administrivia and Introduction. Syllabus.
Homework 1: read PDF of chapter 1 of textbook for Homework 3 next time.here.
Homework 2: Install Perl and Python.
Some notes on programming languages. AI and coding.
8/27 lecture2.pdf lecture2.pptx 36 Viewer Language and computers: openai/whisper, assistive technologies and some limits.
Recursive nature of language.
Introduction to natural language analysis: syntactic structure. Parser demos, ChatGPT.
Homework 3

September

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides
Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint
9/1 lecture3.pdf lecture3.pptx 15 Viewer Homework 3 Review.
Guest presentation: Jeff Winkelman, Career Development & Employee Relations, Social & Behavioral Sciences
SBS Resume Building
9/3 lecture4.pdf lecture4.pptx 38 Viewer What is a Language Model: a look at text completion. English subject verb agreement. Oddities.
LLM: memorizing quotes. ChatGPT-2 to 5.
Beginning programming with Perl: focusing on proper use of quotes. QWERTY keyboard history. ChatGPT help.
world.perl / world.py
Homework 4: using GPT-2, Stanza and Berkeley Neural Parser.
9/8 lecture5.pdf lecture5.pptx 28 Viewer A note on submission dates
Homework 4 review and extensions: AI subword tokenization
A bit more on quoting.
Recommend installing WSL2 (Ubuntu) on Windows 11.
perlintro review: scalars and arrays.
9/11 lecture6.pdf lecture6.pptx 41 Viewer perlintro contd.
@ARGV array and some array operations.
Numeric and string equality. Coercion. Repetition. General looping: while, for, foreach. List range.
Useful string functions, including chomp and split. tr.
String length: bytes vs. characters (utf-8).
File I/O: open and <filehandle>.
Programs: myprog.perl / myprog.py
Program: read.perl
Example text file: falconheavylaunch.txt
Homework 5: two exercises.
Data files: 5letters.txt / 6letters.txt / 7letters.txt

October

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides
Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint

November

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides
Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint

December

Date Lecture Notes Number
of Slides
Panopto Topic
PDF Powerpoint


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Last modified: Thu Sep 10 17:02:38 MST 2026