The Minor in Natural Language Processing is an 18-credit hour program. It introduces students to approaches to the study of Natural Language Processing and provides them with the knowledge and the tools used in NLP research and its applications in the language industry, including system development, implementation and evaluation.

Program Objectives

• Gain a theoretically grounded appreciation of contemporary work in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• Develop practical skills in writing and implementing grammar fragments in mainstream NLP formalisms, and in implementing systems.
• Introduce styles of argumentation and evaluation criteria used in NLP research.
• Recognize contemporary computationally oriented grammar formalisms and linguistic descriptions using these formalisms.
• Develop a critical appreciation of a selection of recent research in NLP.

Program Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this program, students will be able to:

• Introduce different approaches to the study of language adopted in contemporary work in NLP.
• Explore the interface of the study of language and contemporary work in NLP.
• Identify key concepts, issues, ideas, theories, techniques styles of argumentation and evaluation criteria used in contemporary NLP.
• Demonstrate methods and tools employed in contemporary NLP research in relation to collection, analysis and presentation of data, programming, system development and evaluation.
• Illustrate a range of applications that constitute natural language processing and language technology and the issues that arise in constructing natural language processing applications.
• Appraise simple natural language processing systems.