LTI: Language, Technology and the Internet

Francis (フランシス) Bond (凡土) : 2010, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2020, 2021 (as HG2052), 2023, 2024

Thursday 16:45-18:15, Room 2.39, tř. Svobody 26, 779 00 Olomouc

This course explores the intersection of language, technology and the internet. We start by looking at the introduction of writing and how it can be represented on computers. We then look at speech and how it differs from text. These are compared to different media of communication such as email, blogs and chat. The internet has made new methods of writing possible, as well as made access to an incredible variety and amount of text. We study how wikipedia pages are written, and students will write their own pages. In the second half of the course, we learn about how information is represented electronically, both as text and meta-text. We finish with a discussion of large language models and AI. The implications of this technology for our thinking and understanding of language will also be discussed.

There is no set text-book, all the material is covered in the lectures. As a result, you need to actually come to the lectures. General guidelines to the course are given in lecture one.

Course Page: Course Page (here); Source: Source on Github

Course Outline

Wk	Date	Content (click to download)	Further Reading	Misc
1	09-26	Introduction, Organization: Main Issues	What can search terms tell us? Which is more efficient: Chinese or English Rants about technology through the ages	Media Usage Form Media Usage Diary (sample) Results: 2014, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024
2	10-03	Writing and Text	Sproat (2010) Ch 3	Introduce Assignment 1 Selected papers from previous years.
3	10-10	Speech and Language Technology	Sproat (2010, Ch 6)	Festival TTS Mouth Bot Readspeaker Demo
4	10-17	New Mediums: Email, Usenet, Blogs and Chat	Crystal (2006, Ch 3–6) and some from this class.	Q&A with David Crystal on Internet Linguistics
5	10-24	Wikis and Collaboration	Wikipedia:About	Assignment 2 Ex 0 (12th) Make a wiki account and user page Multilingual Consent Form
6	10-31	The World Wide Web and HTML	Crystal (2006) Ch 7	Assignment 1 Due: Nov 8 17:00 CET Assignment 2 Ex 1: Improve a page Pick your topic
Reading Week
7	11-14	The Web as Corpus	Kilgarriff (2004); Kilgariff and Grefenstette (2003) Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars (Nunberg, 2009)
8	11-21	Text, Meta-text and Trust	Marcus, Santorini and Marcinkiewicz (2004) A Gentle Introduction to Metadata (Jeff Good, 2002)
9	Short break		Watch: Simon Willison on AI (PyCon 2024 Keynote)
10	12-05	AI and Large Language Models I		Assignment 2 Presentation
11	12-12	AI and Large Language Models II	Practical: Let's try to side quest with AI! Notes on the new Claude analysis JavaScript code execution tool
12	12-19	AI and Large Language Models III		Assignment 2 Due on January 10, 2025
13	-	Review and Conclusions		Assignment 3 Due January 31, 2025

Recommended Readings

• Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila (2001). The semantic web. Scientific American pages 29-37.
• Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. In Seventh International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW 1998).
• David Crystal (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.
• Markus Dickinson, Chris Brew and Detmar Meurers (2013) Language and Computers. Wiley-Blackwell
• Adam Kilgariff and Gregory Grefenstette, editors (2003). Web as Corpus: Special issue of Computational Linguistics. Vol 29 no 3. ACL.
• Adam Kilgarriff (2004). Web as corpus. In Sampson and McCarthy (2004), chapter 42, pages 471–473.
• Andrey Kolmogorov (1968) Three approaches to the quantitative definition of information in International Journal of Computer Mathematics.
• Marcus, M. P., Santorini, B., and Marcinkiewicz, M. A. (2004). Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn treebank. In Sampson and McCarthy (2004), chapter 21, pages 242–257.
• Chris Manning and Hinrich Schütze (1999) Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.
• Geoffry Sampson and Diana McCarthy, editors (2004). Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline. Continuum.
• Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., and Berners-Lee, T. (2006). The semantic web revisited. IEEE Intelligent Systems, pages 1541–1672.
• Claude E. Shannon (1948) A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Bell System Technical Journal, 27, pp. 379–423 & 623–656, July & October, 1948.
• Richard Sproat, (2010). Language, Technology, and Society. Oxford University Press.
• LANGUAGE@INTERNET "an open-access, peer-reviewed, scholarly electronic journal that publishes original research on language and language use mediated by the Internet, the World Wide Web, and mobile technologies." (Now an example of link rot)

Assessment

• Assignment 1 (20%);
  • Describe a different modality of communication and compare it to speech and text
• Assignment 2 (40%)
  • Create or enhance a wikipedia page about linguistics
  • Using Wikipedia to Re-envision the Term Paper
  • As part of this you will present the page you are planning to work on to the class
    • explain why this subject is notable
    • show the current state of the page and how you plan to improve it
    • outline the sources you plan to use
    • Aim to present for around 10 minutes
    • Either prepare slides (recommended) or talk over the wiki page
    • You do not have to have started changing the page
  • At the end of this assignment the page should be a good page
• Assignment 3 (30%)
  • Create a linguistic resource using LLMs
• Classroom participation (10%)
• Please follow the (Computational) Linguistic Style Guidelines: a guide for the flummoxed

Source code for this course available here https://github.com/bond-lab/Language-Technology-and-the-Internet under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence — CC BY 4.0.

Francis Bond <bond@ieee.org> Palacký University

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