The course "Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Technologies" centers on the basic and fundamental concepts of the interdisciplinary area of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science. Its purpose is to cover a wide range of technical and advanced issues from Natural Language Generation, machine translation, dialogue systems and chatbots to semantic networks and machine learning. Significant topics from Theoretical Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and even from Humanities and Social Sciences will be introduced through the dynamic and ever-changing prism of several state-of-the-art computing applications, breakthrough projects, theoretical frameworks, and dominant programming languages. This course will use a methodology of empirical linguistic analysis and processing of natural language that includes speech and language processing, machine learning, machine translation, language and knowledge representation, computational stylistics, and Digital Humanities.
In particular, the main aim of the course is to familiarize students with dominant and on-going research questions in this innovative and interdisciplinary area and to provide them access to several applications and projects, while at the same time familiarizing them to language and knowledge (en)coding. Moreover, we will also focus on how theoretical and applied linguistic theories are applied to the most up-to-date text processing techniques, language generation and knowledge representations of any Linguistics area. Theoretical and technical issues such as language models, neural networks, language generation, text encoding and annotation, ontologies, chatbots, information extraction will be supported by activities and assignments that will enable students to apply tools, data and algorithms.
