# Computational Linguistics

Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/languages-computational-linguistics
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Category: Languages
Slides: 31
Updated: 2026-05-15T22:18:21.789Z
Tags: languages, computational, linguistics

## Summary

Computational linguistics is the discipline of making language tractable for machines — and, almost accidentally, of making machines that have changed what language is. Key sections include: Comp · Ling.; Opening What language is, to a computer.; Chapter I Shannon, 1948.; Chapter II The Chomsky hierarchy.; Chapter III The Georgetown experiment, ALPAC, the winter.; Chapter IV The Penn Treebank and the data turn.; Chapter V Hidden Markov models and the speech bridge.; Chapter VI Distributional semantics — the word as company.; Chapter VII Recurrent networks and the long-distance problem.; Chapter VIII "Attention is all you need.".

## Slide Outline

1. Comp · Ling.
2. Opening What language is, to a computer.
3. Chapter I Shannon, 1948.
4. Chapter II The Chomsky hierarchy.
5. Chapter III The Georgetown experiment, ALPAC, the winter.
6. Chapter IV The Penn Treebank and the data turn.
7. Chapter V Hidden Markov models and the speech bridge.
8. Chapter VI Distributional semantics — the word as company.
9. Chapter VII Recurrent networks and the long-distance problem.
10. Chapter VIII "Attention is all you need."
11. Chapter IX The pre-training paradigm.
12. Chapter X Tokens, subwords, and the unit problem.
13. Chapter XI Kaplan, Chinchilla, and the laws of scale.
14. Chapter XII Emergent capabilities.
15. Chapter XIII What does the model know?
16. Chapter XIV The multilingual question.
17. Chapter XV Machine translation, finally.
18. Chapter XVI Speech, voice, and audio language models.
19. Chapter XVII Chain of thought, and reasoning as inference-time scaling.
20. Chapter XVIII RLHF, instruction-tuning, and the alignment loop.
21. Chapter XIX Agents and tool use.
22. Chapter XX Programming languages as natural languages.
23. Chapter XXI The LLM as a linguistic object.
24. Chapter XXII The benchmark treadmill.
25. Chapter XXIII Closed and open frontiers.
26. Chapter XXIV What LLMs still can't do.
27. Chapter XXV People worth knowing.
28. Chapter XXVI Twenty-five works.
29. Chapter XXVII Watch & read.
30. Chapter XXVIII Where the field goes.
31. The end of the deck.

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