Language Processing in Humans and Machines

Catalog description

Understanding language requires transforming sequences of sounds into words, combining words into meaningful thoughts, and incorporating thoughts into an ongoing discourse. Psychologists and linguists have been trying to reverse-engineer how humans do this so easily, at the speed of conversation. In parallel, computer scientists have been trying to engineer machines to solve the same problems, leading to products like Siri and Alexa. This class will explore how these two kinds of research can help each other, bringing recent insights from machine learning into the study of human language processing, and insights from human processing into the architectures of machine language systems.