230562 English in Application Contexts: Talking Computers (S) (WiSe 2007/2008)

Course description

The goal of this seminar is to familiarise participants with linguistic aspects of the technical infrastructure of the information society, in contrast to the Language and Technology class in the previous semester, which was concerned with general application types (the theory and practice of word processing and of speech synthesis).

The class will involve much practical work, and give insights into how dictation software, screen readers for the blind, machine translation and other applications of talking computers work.

The practical work will involve applications of simple software tools (which everyone will easily understand - no worry necessary!) in order to create actual speaking computer applications, and to evaluate them.

The specific topics to be dealt with centre on corpus linguistics and methods for extracting information from texts, for text generation, and for machine translation. The notion of talking computer is used to represent a wide range of intelligent activities of this kind.

The modes of qualification differ from curriculum to curriculum and will be discussed at the beginning of the course.

The class counts either for PM1 or for PM2 but not both. Participants are required to produce course portfolios on the web, and to update them every week.

See also the class website for further information.

Literaturangaben

Literature on the topic will be provided on the course website.

Externe Kommentarseite

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Classes/Classes2007SS/index.html