Lecture, four hours; laboratory, one hour. Requisites: courses 120B, Program in Computing 10C (or Computer Science 32). Recommended: course 165B or 200B. Overview of formal computational ideas underlying kinds of grammars used in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics, and some connections to applications in natural language processing. Topics include recursion, relationship between probabilities and grammars, and parsing algorithms. P/NP or letter grading.

Review Summary

Clarity
10.0 / 10
Organization
10.0 / 10
Time
5-10 hrs/week
Overall
10.0 / 10

Reviews

    Quarter Taken: Winter 2021 Online
    Grade: A+

    This class is super interesting if you're interested in the intersection of programming and linguistics! All of the assignments (which are more or less weekly) are Haskell coding assignments with pretty detailed descriptions of what functions to implement. As someone with no prior Haskell experience, it wasn't too bad. However, you might have some trouble if you don't have any functional programming experience at all. The assignments are very relevant to the concepts learned in class, and follow pretty closely with each set of notes.

    The class notes are also super detailed and useful to refer to. There is basically a set of notes for each week, and those notes are pretty much all you need for the homework. They're typeset quite nicely in LaTeX, and Timothy usually annotated the notes using a tablet during the lecture as he went through them.

    I found the lecture style to be very clear, though at times they moved quite slowly. Timothy is great about answering questions and clarifying confusions though, which is a awesome. He is also very accommodating and receptive to feedback, and very eager to improve the class.

    There is also one final project due at the end of finals week, which consists of some Haskell code and a brief report of what the code does. Don't worry if you can't think of a good project to do, as he provides a pretty detailed list of ideas on what to do.

    Overall, I definitely recommend this class. It's super interesting, fun, and not too much work! The assignments are pretty straightforward and the instructors are very helpful if you need any support. There are also no exams, which is a huge plus in my opinion.

Course

Instructor
Timothy Hunter
Previously taught
21F 21W 20W 19W 18W 17W
Formerly offered as
LING C185A

Grading Information

  • No group projects

  • Attendance not required

  • No midterms

  • No final

  • 0% recommend the textbook