Exactly 10 days ago started my new course called Speech and Language Processing. It’s offered by the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts (wow, I like this official translation of Humanistisk fakultet). I was really curious about the course. I have never dealt with linguistics in detail, but I’m actually really interested in this stuff. Some people know that I’m a big fan of projects like Zwiebelfisch or Deppenapostroph or Deppenleerzeichen (which fight against absurdities in the German language).

Whatever, the course is held by Kirk Sullivan (UK), and he makes a good job. It is definitely one of the most interesting courses I’ve ever had in my university life. You learn a lot about the system of languages (syntax, semantics, pragmatics …) and Kirk enriches the theory with a bunch of examples in English, Swedish and German (I’m even allowed to hand in my assignments in German, but I think I won’t). Sometimes it feels a little bit unstructured and confusing, but hey – I do not need to have perfect notes since there is no final exam!

As expected, the topic is closely connected to computer science. Some students are linguists; some others come from the more technical domain. It’s nice to see that also humanists are allowed to deal with regular expressions, finite state automata and other concepts of information technology. The combination of language and computers is really of interest to me. I’m looking forward to learning more about that stuff.

BTW: I passed both Analysis of Financial Data and Svenska Steg 3.