Introduction: language and computation

Computation and language Computers are tools which "automate" the transformation of symbolic/digital information

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing everything in the computer's world is digital (even, binary): entities (data), space (locations/addresses), time (discrete clock) and "meaning" (instructions)

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction in order to tame the complexity of large-scale problems specified to microscopic detail, we must use a layered series of abstractions ("Hierarchical equivalence relations: the arpeggiated chords of Computer Science.")

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction
	The traditional conception of computational linguistics CL usually means "using the computer as a tool to measure, analyze and model linguistic phenomena"

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction
	The traditional conception of computational linguistics
	Computers as language and medium modern treatments of computing from a rhetorical perspective consider computing as a "next step" in the evolution of language (see Logan's "The Fifth Language" and Levinson's "The Soft Edge") (an alternative views of the evolution of media: Richard Duke's "The Future's Language")

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction
	The traditional conception of computational linguistics
	Computers as language and medium
	Language and writing as technology Plato records Socrates' negative views on the "new technology" of writing (relative to traditional speech-based pedagogy) in Phaedrus (writing is, after all, the first "digital" medium, based on discrete symbols)

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction
	The traditional conception of computational linguistics
	Computers as language and medium
	Language and writing as technology
	A new perspective: the linguistics of computation here we will consider computers programs as texts, and programming as a linguistic act

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction
	The traditional conception of computational linguistics
	Computers as language and medium
	Language and writing as technology
	A new perspective: the linguistics of computation
	Other persepctives from within Computer Science many people in AI (artifical life, machine learning, ) would disagree fundamentally with the symbolic/designed perspective, preferring a pre-symbolic/emergent one

Introduction: language and computation

	Computation and language
	The digital underpinnings of computing
	The need for abstraction
	The traditional conception of computational linguistics
	Computers as language and medium
	Language and writing as technology
	A new perspective: the linguistics of computation
	Other persepctives from within Computer Science
	Overview our approach will follow a pedagogical path through Computer Science mirroring (my part of) Willamette's Computer Science curriculum