L555Programming for Computational Linguistics
3 Credits

This course is geared towards students concentrating in
Computational Linguistics with little or no experience in
programming; Linguistics students are welcome, too. It will
introduce the fundamentals of programming and computer science,
aiming at attaining practical skills for text processing.  While we
will work with Python, the main focus is more on introducing basic
concepts in programming such as loops or functions. In contrast to
similar courses in Computer Science, we will concentrate on problems
in Computational Linguistics, which generally involve managing text,
searching in text, and extracting information from text. For this
reason, one part of the course will concentrate on regular
expression search.

Through lectures, lab sessions, and (bi-)weekly assignments,
students will learn the essentials of Python and how to apply these
skills to natural language data.

We will work with the following textbook:

Magnus Lie Hetland (2005) Beginning Python: From Novice to
Professional. APress.