LING 073 / CPSC 013 — Spring 2026
Computational Linguistics

Professor:Jonathan North Washington
Office:Pearson 105
Office phone:x6134
Office hours:W 13:30-15:00
& by appointment
Email/messaging: jwashin1@swarth...more.edu
 
Meeting time:TTh 9:55-11:10
Lab hours: TBD
Physical classroom:Martin Hall 327
Course website: http://jnw.domains.swarthmore.edu/ling073
Course wiki: http://wikis.swarthmore.edu/ling073
IRC channel: irc.oftc.net#swatling
Course Moodle site: CPSC013-01-LING073-01-LING073H-01-S26

Course Syllabus

Schedule (subject to change)

weekdatetopicto read (by class) / due (on Friday)
1 20 Jan

Introductions, syllabus

What (and why) is CL (and NLP)?

22 Jan

Linguistic communities and language technology

Long (2007) - Chilean Mapuches in language row with Microsoft

Environment setup

2 27 Jan

Resource identification

Corpus assembly

language selection (due before class)

29 Jan

Library Resources

3 3 Feb

Minoritised languages and language technology

Liu et al. (2022) - Not always about you: Prioritizing community needs when developing endangered language technology

5 Feb

LAB

lab 1 - documentation of resources + Initial corpus assembly

4 10 Feb

Input methods

Lebedev (2004) - Where once was a comma

12 Feb

LAB

lab 2 - keyboard layout

5 17 Feb

Morphological typology

Grammar documentation

Janhunen & Gruzdeva (2016) - Bringing the orthography of an indigenous language to the digital age: The case of Nivkh in the Russian Far East

19 Feb

LAB

lab 3 - Grammar documentation

6 24 Feb

FSTs and morphology

Analyser evaluation

Bird (2009) - Natural Language Processing and Linguistic Fieldwork

26 Feb

LAB

lab 4 - Basic morphological analyser

7 3 Mar

FSTs and phonology

Generator evaluation

Kornai (2013) - Digital Language Death

5 Mar

LAB

lab 5 - Basic morphological generator

10 Mar

Spring break!

12 Mar

Spring break!

8 17 Mar

Midterm project demos

midterm project demos (for class)

19 Mar

Machine translation

Lexical transfer

Khanna et al. (2021) - Recent advances in Apertium, a free / open-source rule-based machine translation platform for low-resource languages (§1, §2, §5)

9 24 Mar

LAB

lab 6 - Lexical transfer (Wednesday)

26 Mar

Models of development, FOSS

Ambiguity resolution: Morphological disambiguation & Lexical selection

Pedersen (2008) - Empiricism Is Not A Matter of Faith

10 31 Mar

LAB

2 Apr

non-symbolic approaches to NLP (guest lecture)

lab 7 - Ambiguity resolution

11 7 Apr

Contrastive grammars

Mahelona (2020) - Te reo Māori Speech Recognition: A Story of Community, Trust, and Sovereignty

9 Apr

LAB

lab 8 - Contrastive grammar

12 14 Apr

Structural transfer

Constituency syntax

Romero (2016) - Bill Gates speaks Kʼicheeʼ! The corporatization of linguistic revitalization in Guatemala

16 Apr

LAB

lab 9 - Structural transfer

13 21 Apr

RBMT evaluation

Moshagen & Trosterud (2019) - Rich Morphology, No Corpus – And We Still Made It. The Sámi Experience

23 Apr

LAB

Bird (2020) - Decolonising Speech and Language Technology

14 28 Apr

LAB

lab 10 - Polished basic RBMT system

30 Apr

LAB

15 10 May

(14:00-17:00)Final project presentation