This material is designed for preparing to study at Masters level (including PhD students who take Masters courses as part of their programme) and is aimed at students from a wide range of backgrounds, whether you consider yourself to be a linguist, computer scientist, mathematician, cognitive scientist, engineer, or from any other related discipline. The beauty of speech and language processing is that all of these disciplines have something to contribute, and none of them are enough on their own.
Your goal? To become an interdisciplinary expert!
Where to start? Well, it depends on your background, so the way to use this course is to follow it through in the suggested order, skipping over material that you already know.
Get the book
There is a comprehensive textbook that gives a great introduction to this area, by Jurafsky and Martin.
Think like a linguist
If you're coming from a Linguistics background, then spend a moment or two checking your understanding of some basic ideas. If you've never studied Linguistics, then this is the place to start.
Think like a computer scientist
To put our Linguistic knowledge and intuitions into practice, we have to translate linguistic concepts into data structures that can then be operated on by an algorithm.
Brush up your mathematics
Mathematics is just a tool, but an essential one. If you find the notation a barrier, then let's do something about that right away...
Think like an engineer
You've taken your intuitions about language, described them as algorithms operating on data structures, and now you need to make them work: time for some engineering...
This is the new version. Still under construction.