This course is a survey of the history and nature of language technologies, from the emergence of writing in ancient civilizations to modern large language models. Topics may include literacy, mechanized speech, speech recognition, machine translation, large language models, generative pre-trained transformers, and the ethics of language technologies. Note that this is not a computational linguistics course and does not cover the mathematical foundations or computational implementation of language models in any depth. The focus of this course is on the historical development of language technologies and their relationship to natural languages, language communities, and the field of linguistics. (This course does not count towards the Linguistics major or specialist programs.)
This course is a survey of the history and nature of language technologies, from the emergence of writing in ancient civilizations to modern large language models. Topics may include literacy, mechanized speech, speech recognition, machine translation, large language models, generative pre-trained transformers, and the ethics of language technologies. Note that this is not a computational linguistics course and does not cover the mathematical foundations or computational implementation of language models in any depth. The focus of this course is on the historical development of language technologies and their relationship to natural languages, language communities, and the field of linguistics. (This course does not count towards the Linguistics major or specialist programs.)
