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Humanities Express

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  • Publisher: College of Humanities at The Ohio State University
  • Volume I Issue 9
  • October 2005
  • Humanities Express Home
Humanities Program Spotlight:

Language and Computers

Image of on-line language translator.
Spoken and written language, perhaps the most central objects of humanistic study, are increasingly going digital, and students of the humanities are following language into this new medium. Nearly all writing in government, business, and universities—e-mail, memos, reports, journal articles, and books—is composed on computers, and much of that written information is stored, searched, and read on computers. Spoken language is also routinely processed by computers—for example, in phone answering systems. These developments are the subject of a new undergraduate course developed by Professors of Linguistics Detmar Meurers and Christopher Brew and graduate teaching associate Markus Dickinson. Linguistics 384, Language and Computers, provides students an opportunity to look under the hood of everyday computer applications that process natural language.
Image of on-line grammar checker.

Students learn how computers are used to represent, process, and organize textual and spoken information, as well as how to get the best out of technologies such as search engines, spelling and grammar checkers, and e-mail filters. Specific topics, and some of the questions associated with them, include the following:

  • Storing language on computers. How are text and speech encoded for computer processing and display? What challenges do different writing systems (e.g., Hebrew, Chinese, and English) pose for text encoding?
  • Searching the Web, library catalogs, and other language-based databases. What different search techniques exist? How can we evaluate the results of a search?
  • Classifying documents. How can we use computers to classify documents, allowing us to build tools such as spam filters?
  • Writer's aids. What do so-called "grammar checkers'" do? On what model of language are such programs based? How should we evaluate their advice?
  • Machine translation. What do Internet-based translation services actually do—and where do they fail? For what purposes can automatic machine translation work reliably?
  • Computer-aided language learning. What is involved in learning a foreign language? What role in language learning can computers play?
  • Social contexts of language technology. What does increasingly sophisticated machine processing of language mean for the way we see ourselves? What assumptions do we make about every user of language, be it a human or a machine?

As ever more sophisticated technologies for processing human language emerge, courses like Language and Computers offer Ohio State students important opportunities to become knowledgeable, critical users—and developers—of those technologies.