“Artificial Intelligence” - or rather, approximations of it - are becoming increasingly prevalent in our day to day lives; from our cars to our refrigerators, in the palms of our hands and even above our heads, A.I is impossible to escape. One of the most important disciplines of A.I is Natural Language Processing - teaching computers to understand and communicate with humans using languages that humans understand. In this beginner Computational Linguistics course, we explore the fascinating world of Language, understand the bridges between human language and computer language, and build exciting projects using NLP and Machine Learning!

• Programming Fundamentals: If & Else conditional statements. Students will learn how conditional statements work, what Boolean expressions (“True” and “False”) mean and their importance, how to write “if” clauses and blocks, how to write intermediary “elif” clauses and blocks and finally how to write “else” blocks. This will culminate in a working understanding of loops, including the “while” loop, which is a quintessential component of programming in any language.
• Natural Language Processing: Students will learn the meaning of natural language processing, how it appears in the world around us and affects our daily lives, important vocabulary words associated with Natural Language Processing and artificial intelligence; simple techniques used to “pre-process” language data, and simple processes machines   employ to try to understand human language.
• Machine Learning Principles: Students will learn the principals of data processing, pillars of machine learning (data collection, data refinement, training models), the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning, and the differences and similarities between Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
• Turing tests: Students will learn about Alan Turing and his proposed Turing test through readings and games and will be asked to surmise whether or not the Turing test is a valid test of Computer Intelligence in today's world.

END OF SESSION PROJECT(S): Virtual Smart House, Sentiment Analysis Program, Word Predictor

N/A

‍

Pre-Requisites: None