This course treats the formal foundations for the description of language and computational methods for processing language. The aim is to enable students to think in a mathematically precise way when characterizing a language, and to use computer tools to process written language.

The course gives an introduction to formal methods in linguistics. It also gives an introduction in digital encoding of text, in electronic language resources (in particular, corpora), in language processing and in language technology applications. This course is targeted at students in linguistics, language studies, computer science, information science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Upon successful completion of the course, the student will be able to:

• explain basic formal methods that are used in research and development of syntax, semantics and natural language processing, e.g. graphs and trees, automata, formal grammars, language classification in the Chomsky hierarchy, algorithms and complexity;
• explain important thinking about automata, grammars and formal languages, e.g. the pumping lemma;
• write simple correct programs for manipulating textual data;
• write regular expressions for search and replacement in text;
• extract information from text on the world wide web;
• use induction as a proof method;
• use correct mathematical formulas:
• use text corpora as empirical material;
• assess text on the world wide web as data;

Lectures (about 26 hours per semester), individual study and exercises.

If fewer than five students are registered to a course, the department might reduce the teaching, please see the department's guidelines regarding this on "Mitt UiB". For courses where this is a possibility, the students get information about this at the beginning of the semester, and before the deadline regarding semester registration February 1 / September 1.