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Computational Linguistics

This is a course on Computational Linguistics. This is a slightly adapted version of the Computational Linguistics course I gave during the Summer Semester of 2020 in the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern as part of my studies there as a PhD student (I still am a PhD student there). I am thankful to the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern and to my advisor Professor Shanley E. M. Allen for the opportunity to prepare these classes during my PhD.

This course was not produced only by me. While the vast majority of the materials you’ll see in this page were (heavily) edited by me, some of them were partly organized/produced/written/inspired by two other people who also gave this lecture in its very first iteration (in 2018): Philipp Blandfort and Kristina Kolesova. Still… this does not necessarily mean they endorse everything I say in my videos.

Protip: Since I speak quite slow, you may want to increase the reproduction speed of the videos, especially if you already know a little what you are watching =)

Context

This course is focused on students of the Master on Cognitive Sciences of the University of Kaiserslautern. At this point of the Master, the students normally do not have a lot of programming background, but learnt some Java in another class. Therefore, I try to be very “gentle” in my introduction to the command line and to Python. Still, at the very end of this course we do see some quite-close-to-state-of-the-art applications, so hopefully the learning curve is not too steep.

When teaching this course, I used an online platform, where I could upload videos. The platform also offered a forum where students could ask questions, and a some space for Downloads. I tried filtering out a few of the references to the forum and to the “Downloads folder” in the materials, but some of them are just impossible to remove. So if you find any one I’ve left in, just consider that

Organization

The course was organized in 11 weeks of content (this is what the “W” means in the menu links), plus a free week for the students to solve questions, and finally a week for the exam. Every week the students had to answer questionnaires about the content of that week, which counted as their “attendance”. Additionally, on every Wednesday, we used Jitsi to have a call in which the students could ask any questions they might have, be it about the questionnaire or about any administrative issue (e.g., they could ask about the exam, or say that the online platform had been down for a few days, or let me know that I forgot to answer a forum post, or anything like that).

(I still intend to find a way to release the questionnaires, just in case anyone is wondering)

Licence

I am not fully sure I own everything that I am posting here.

For things that I don’t own (which I believe are none), and in case someone who does own something here wants their ownership to be respected, I am happy to take down whatever they tell me to.

Except for the things listed in the previous paragraph (which I believe are none), everything here is licenced according to the following licence (however, read below a few details):

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The following things are owned also by Philipp Blandfort (they were mostly created/idealized by him, and I then heavily changed them for the purposes of this course). In these cases, if you use them, mention both of us as authors =)

Notice that the slides have only my name because I cannot be sure that Philipp “endorses” their final form.

The following things are owned also by Kristina Kolesova (they were mostly created/idealized by her, and I then heavily changed them for the purposes of this course). In these cases, if you use them, mention both of us as authors =)

For all the other things (the text of the pages, the other jupyter notebooks, the other slides, and the Youtube videos), you can mention only me as the author.