LING 490

Spring 2025 All Classes

All Classes

Special Topics in Linguistics

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Credit: 3 OR 4 hours.

Course provides an opportunity to focus on various subfields of the linguistic sciences, depending on the interests of the faculty and student.

3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated as topic varies to a maximum of 9 undergraduate hours or 12 graduate hours. Students may register for up to two sections in the same term. Prerequisite: LING 100, LING 400, or consent of instructor.

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LING 490 class schedule data for spring 2025
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
63366	Lecture-Discussion	DJ	11:00AM -12:20PM	TR	G48 Literatures, Cultures, & Ling	Dunn, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/25-05/07/25 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Meets with LING 506 Topic: Computational Syntax Description: An introduction to both computational models of syntactic phenomena and the syntactic evaluation of language models. Topics include types of grammars (representations), the use of grammars for parsing and generation, the learning of grammars (induction), the comparison of grammars (variation and typology), and the targeted syntactic evaluation of large language models (probing). From a theoretical perspective, the course works mainly with phrase structure grammar, dependency grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and construction grammar. The intended audience is either (i) students in computational linguistics who are interested in working with syntactic phenomena or (ii) students in syntax who are interested in a linguistic evaluation of computational models. Prerequisite: LING 100 or LING 400. No previous computational experience is required.
36498	Lecture-Discussion	G4	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	1140 Literatures, Cultures, & Ling	Nelson, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/25-05/07/25 Credit: 4 hours Section Info: Topic: Computation and Phonological Theory. This seminar will cover current approaches to computational phonology from the “model-theoretic” perspective. While computational phonology is an umbrella term that can cover many different approaches, this seminar takes the model-theoretic approach for the following reasons. First, it has direct ties with formal language theory, computational complexity theory, and computational learning theory which provide a way to quantify the restrictiveness of various phonological theories. Second, it provides a meta-language to reason about the similarities of what are often thought to be disparate theories. The primary focus of this seminar is theoretical, and the main goal is to show how computation itself can be a primary influence on phonological theory building rather than a secondary implementation mechanism. No previous experience with coding or computer science is necessary or expected. The prerequisite: an undergraduate phonology course (LING 302 for undergraduates or equivalent for first year PhD students). Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
53662	Lecture-Discussion	JD	ARRANGED	n.a.	Location Pending	Dunn, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/25-05/07/25 Section Info: Topic: “Research Capstone”. A capstone experience for students in computational linguistics. Students will develop a substantial semester-long research project which brings together their prior coursework in both theoretical linguistics as a discipline and computational linguistics as a methodology. Major outputs include a written presentation of their findings, an oral presentation of the broader impacts of their research, and an open-source repository documenting the code and data used in the project.
73431	Lecture-Discussion	MS	2:00PM -3:20PM	TR	205 Gregory Hall	Anand, G Maskharashvili, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/25-05/07/25 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Meets with LING 506 Topic: Computational Semantics Semantics attributes a tenable interpretation or representation of the "meaning" of a sentence, whereas computational semantics studies how to arrive at that interpretation. Assuming, for instance, that we know how to represent meanings of ‘dog’, ‘every,’ and ‘bark,’ and we know how to put those words together to spell out a sentence (syntax) ‘every dog barks.’ Under these premises, computational semantics aims at computing the representation of the meaning of ‘every dog barks.’ Prerequisite: Either of the following ones: LING 307, LING 400, LING 407, LING 438, LING 507, LING 547, LING 551
45941	Lecture-Discussion	UG3	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	1140 Literatures, Cultures, & Ling	Nelson, S	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/25-05/07/25 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: Topic: Computation and Phonological Theory. This seminar will cover current approaches to computational phonology from the “model-theoretic” perspective. While computational phonology is an umbrella term that can cover many different approaches, this seminar takes the model-theoretic approach for the following reasons. First, it has direct ties with formal language theory, computational complexity theory, and computational learning theory which provide a way to quantify the restrictiveness of various phonological theories. Second, it provides a meta-language to reason about the similarities of what are often thought to be disparate theories. The primary focus of this seminar is theoretical, and the main goal is to show how computation itself can be a primary influence on phonological theory building rather than a secondary implementation mechanism. No previous experience with coding or computer science is necessary or expected. The prerequisite: an undergraduate phonology course (LING 302 for undergraduates or equivalent for first year PhD students). Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.