Overview

Summary

Course mechanics; Structural characteristics of Slavic languages and their relevance to computational linguistics; Language industries: possibilities and limitations; Operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) and non-English writing systems.

Homework

HW # 1 (due end of Week 1): Part 1: Get your asurite id if you do not have one, create a Web space at www.public.asu.edu and e-mail your personal space address to me. This is very easy to do. All you need is to go to the page http://help.asu.edu/sims/selfhelp/SelfhelpKbView.seam?parature_id=8373-8193-5003 and follow the instructions. Part 2: Set-up your computer in a manner such that you can create a text in a non-Western-European script. E-mail me such text. This is how you do it for Russian: Windows 98/2000 Do the following. Choose: Start->Settings->Control Panel->Keyboard. Click on the Language tab. Click on the Add button. Choose Russian Press OK Choose the sequence which will toggle between the keyboard layouts (e.g., Left Shift-Ctrl) Press OK   Windows XP Start->Control Panel->(if you are not in the category view,  press the “Switch to Category View” button->Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options->Add Other Languages->Press the Language tab-> Press the Details Button -> Add -> Choose Russian-> Press OK -> Choose the Keys settings   If you want to see the template of your keyboard as an always-on-the-top, use Start->All Programs->Accessories->Accessibility->On-screen Keyboard. Macintosh OS 9 & X   Click here and everything will be explained

Course mechanics

See the Administrivia section of this course. All homework assignments, quizes, etc. are listed in appropriate sections. This is a paperless course. That means that all materials are presented and all assignments submitted in the electronic format.

Slavic Languages

The following features of Slavic languages pose a particular problem in the field of information technologies:

• Rich inflectional morphology,
• HIgh level of both morpho-syntactic and lexical ambiguity,
• Unpredictable word order,
• Long and intricate sentence structures

Click here to see several examples of these features

One should note that IT resources for the Russian language are far more developed than those for other Slavic languages.

Language Industries

In recent years there one can observe increased need for IT literate linguists, with Slavic linguists not being an exception. This demand is a result of intensive development in the fields of:

• CALL (coputer assisted language learning
• digitizing printed resources,
• IR (information retrieval)
• MT (machine translation) and other forms of NLP (natural language processing)

Most commonly Slavic linguists fit into the language industries in the roles of computational lexicographes and grammarians, preparing knowledge bases for CALL, IR, MT and other NLP systems.

Check out the Linguist List to see how many job positions is advertised every week.

Operating systems

Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms are at present all equipped to accomodate the specific characters of Slavic languages. All tasks addressed in this course can be performed on either of the three platforms (and same is true about software packages used), although the Windows platform, as by far hte most common, will be used in class.

If you want to switch to Linux (it is free and it is politically correct), you may want to start with Mandrake. It allows you to run it concurrently with your Windows platform. If you then decide to use other common distributions, such as Red Hat or Suse