Psychocomputational Linguistics: A Gateway to the Computational Linguistics Curriculum

Computational modeling of human language processes is a small but growing subfield of computational linguistics. This paper describes a course that makes use of recent research in psychocomputational modeling as a framework to introduce a number of mainstream computational linguistics concepts to an audience of linguistics, cognitive science and computer science doctoral students. The emphasis on what I take to be the largely interdisciplinary nature of computational linguistics is particularly germane for the computer science students. Since 2002 the course has been taught three times under the auspices of the MA/PhD program in Linguistics at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center. A brief description of some of the students’ experiences after having taken the course is also provided.