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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 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 32 Viewer Language and computers: openai /whisper, assitive technologies and 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 Homework 3 Review. What is a Language Model: a look at text completion. English subject verb agreement. Quotes. ChatGPT-2 to 5. Homework 4: using GPT-2, Stanza and Berkeley Neural Parser.
9/3 lecture4.pdf lecture4.pptx Viewer Beginning programming with Perl: focusing on proper use of quotes. QWERTY keyboard history. ChatGPT help.
world.perl / world.py
9/8 lecture5.pdf lecture5.pptx Viewer Homework 4 review and extensions. A bit more on quoting. Installing WSL2 / Ubuntu on Windows 11. perlintro: scalars and arrays.

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: Wed Aug 19 12:43:38 MST 2026