SIG Teaching: Helsinki
The Department of General Linguistics offers a BA and a MA curriculum in language technology (computational linguistics) since 1987. Language technology has a permanent teaching staff of one professor (Kimmo Koskenniemi) and one university lecturer (Graham Wilcock).
There is a national KIT-Network of 9 universities for teaching language technology. In order for a course to qualify as a KIT-course, the student must be able to complete it from distance without traveling.
University of Helsinki has a Master's Program "Language, Speech and Translation Technology" run by the Department of General Linguistics, Department of Translation Studies and the Department of Speech Sciences. We would be interested in converting the program into a Nordic/international one or into something compatible with such.
Areas of expertise available for the program
- Morphological parsing (Kimmo Koskenniemi)
- Finite-state techniques in language technology (Anssi Yli-Jyrä, docent)
Distant learning experience and practice
- Most of the courses of language technology at the bachelor's studies (i.e. 25+45 ECTS points) are presently offered by the Department of General Linguistics as distant learning courses to those who wish to complete them so. The courses are offered to students in 9 universities.
- Distant learning relies on offering the course material and assignments via web pages and communicating with the students with email. Some courses use learning environments like the Moodle, some use a wiki.
- A set of recipes for videoconferencing has been compiled, see "collaborating through the Internet" at the navigation bar on the left. The recipes are based on the use of commonly or even freely available tools and can be easily adopted by laymen.
- Accustomed to participate meetings using the Marratech videoconferencing system in Gothenburg.
Courses offered to Nordic Master Program
- Introduction to LT applications (a very elementary introduction) 6 ECTS
- Morphological parsing (introduction to existing analyzers and building a small parser using existing tools) 6 ECTS
- Theory of finite-state parsing methods, 6 ECTS
- History of LT (classical papers and articles), 2 ECTS
- Evaluation of LT applications, 6 ECTS