Language X Tech: An Introduction to Computational Linguistics

Computational Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that brings key changes to our lives. Manipulating language is one of the earliest applications of computation, with cryptanalysis for translating dating back to 9th century arabic scholars, and also one of the most exciting applications of modern technology, like language generation models such as GPT-3. Research in this field powers machine translation systems like Google Translate, interactive dialogue systems like Siri, helps us learn more about the nature of language by investigating large amounts of data, and much more. In this talk I'll cover details about what exactly is Computational Linguistics, what you can do with it, why study it, how to break into this field, how it's applied in language learning, and where to find resources to learn more about it.