Advanced notions of General Linguistics

This course has the goal of discussing the strands of linguistic thought which are among the founding elements for the elaboration and improvement of contemporary Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation studies and applications.  

Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, including language management for Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Translation (MT) have a solid grounding in linguistic theories as well as in engineering thought.

Our approach in this course will be focused on the linguist’s view of linguistic issues that are at the basis of modern applications, rather than on the commonly prevailing engineering perspective. 

The need for delineating models of language formalization will be regarded as the common framework of different theories inspired by the consideration of natural languages either as systems or as contextualized codes.

We will go directly into the approaches to language study that have been and still are used by engineers to produce AI applications. Two different standpoints, a bottom-up (‘empiricist’) and a top-down one (‘rationalist’) will be delineated.

Starting from contemporary linguistic theories in AI and MT applications, past perspectives will also be considered in order to identify the development of the main lines of thought that evolved first as opposing views, but then were to become closely intertwined. This brief look at modern theories (first half of the 20th century) can be seen as reference bases for the contemporary developments of linguistic thought on which we will focus (1950’s onward). 

1. (A) J. Léon. "Automating Linguistics" Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2021 Pagine/Capitoli: pp. 1-100; 141-163

2. (C) J. McElvenny. "A History of Modern Linguistics" Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

The course is given in English.

Further materials necessary for the programme will be available for the students at the SeLLF.

• The course is structured in lectures that introduce to an active participation of the students

• The exam will be oral and will cover the course program.

  For the students who attended the classes their active participation may be taken into account in the final assessment.

  The grade will be assigned based on the following criteria:

  - Knowledge of the program resulting both from the oral exam and the active participation during the course, if any.

  - Ability to identify the key concepts of the discipline and critically connect them, demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter.

  - Ability to express one's knowledge correctly, coherently, and using the specialized language of the subject appropriately. 

The course is given in English

English