Language The Computer

Traditionally linguistic analysis was done largely by hand, but computer-based methods and tools are becoming increasingly more widely used in contemporary research. This course provides an introduction to the key instruments and resources available on the personal computer that can assist the linguist in performing fast, flexible and accurate quantitative analyses. Students will learn a scripting language (Python) and use it and the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) to analyse linguistic phenomena. The following topics will be covered in detail:

File input/output

Control Structures

Frequency Distributions

Regular Expressions

Access to lexical resources

Classification