School Has Started

After one month of Swedish language intensive course (the exam was on Saturday) my normal classes started today with a course in Language Engineering. The different topics are related to natural language processing in general, featuring everything from basic linguistics and mathematics to speech reception and production, language understanding and also grammar validation and text summarising.

At the beginning kursledaren Ola Knutsson asked if there are students present who don't speak Swedish. I was the only one. He told me that the course language is Swedish (which I knew) but that I am welcome to speak English at any time (questions, emails, presentations, assignments, examinations). The first session was more or less understandable for me, but it was mainly administrative stuff and an introduction to natural language processing, which wasn't totally new to me. I'll see how it'll work in the future.

At least the course literature is in English and was already recommended in Stefan Kopp's HCI-lecture last summer term in Bielefeld:

Jurafsky, D; Martin, J.H. (2000): Speech and Language Processing. Prentice Hall.