Cohort July 2022: Faculty of Arts – Leah Jo, Grace Zhang, Marcell Maitinsky, Jungyeul Park
Project background
LING 242: Computational Tools for Linguistic Analysis,” focuses on computational tools and their implementations for linguistic analysis – including pre-processing, morphological analysis, and syntactic analysis. During Term 1 2021, undergraduate students who took LING 242 faced some challenges, including understanding advanced computational linguistic topics such as machine translation and classification using machine learning.
Project details
Therefore, we aim to achieve the following main objectives:
- Redesign LING 242 to make it more accessible for non-CS students,
- Redesign LING 242 to make it more accessible for non-linguistic students,
- Provide less discrepancy between course content and exam content,
- Re-examine the prerequisite courses and re-evaluate which ones are relevant.
As stated previously, undergraduate students felt that the current course was difficult because it was too technical for non-Computer Science (CS) students, and too theoretical for non-linguistics students. As a result of this project, we will allow non-linguistics students to achieve a better learning experience with easier comprehension of linguistic concepts; and vice-versa for non-CS students. Following feedback from previous students who struggled with core concepts of either linguistics or computer science, we can plan a more thorough introduction for a sufficient understanding of fundamental computational linguistic analysis tools.
Through this redesign of LING 242, students will:
- Know how to use computational tools regardless of their computational background,
- Know how to analyze linguistic structure in text using computational tools with newly acquired linguistic analysis skills.