INFO 370 Minimum Grade: D or ISYS 370 Minimum Grade: D

Curriculum Role:
This is an elective course. The most closely related course in the undergraduate curriculum is Information Retrieval Systems (INF0 300).  That course emphasizes document processing, XML, and many aspects of search engines including Web search technologies, search interfaces, multimedia retrieval, and social retrieval.  By comparison, INFO 360 covers a range of language technologies beyond search. Together, these courses are the only part of the undergraduate curriculum which introduces students to processing techniques and applications for un-structured and semi-structured natural language.

Course Rationale:
Human language is central to many human activities but until recently, processing unrestricted natural language has been very difficult. Increasingly, the challenges are being addressed and applications developed. This course will introduce students to several human language technologies.  Linguistic and cognitive models as well as computational approaches will be discussed in terms of practical applications.

Course Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of this course, a student will be able to:
• Recognize the major rule-based and statistical models for language processing
• Apply basic text analysis speech analysis techniques
• Apply summarization and translation applications.
• Develop interactive conversational systems
• Evaluate language-processing tools.

Course Content:
Principal topics and the approximate number of weeks devoted to each are:
• Overview (1)
• Approaches for text analysis of syntax and semantics (1)
• Text planning and generation (1)