This course is designated as an IT-integrated course. Students who do the course can use it to fulfill the university’s IT requirement. The 21st century is the Age of the Internet, with virtual addresses ending in Dot.com and others. What is the Internet all about? Essentially, it is about information and communication. Language is by far the most important means of communication and information exchange amongst human beings. To fully appreciate our own place in the contemporary world and to make the best of the many opportunities presented by new forms of communication, we need to know more about language. This course is an introduction to language: its nature and its relationship with facets of life in the contemporary world. Some of the questions to address in this course include the following: Can computers and the internet do translations automatically and accurately? What kinds of language data are available on the Internet? How can they be used to make grammars and dictionaries? What tools are available on the Internet for the learning of languages and linguistics? Students who complete this course can go on to do courses such as LING2041 and many other Human Language Technology courses.

• Natural Language Processing: Can computers be trained to understand and produce human language?
• Machine Translation: Can computers do translations automatically and accurately?
• Corpus Linguistics: What kinds of language data are available on the Internet? How can they be used to make grammars and dictionaries?
• Chinese Language Computing: How many kinds of Chinese inputting methods are there? Which one suits you best?
• Internet Tools: What tools are available on the Internet for the learning of languages and linguistics?
• Human-Computer Interfaces: What is "ergonomics"? What is currently being done to improve the quality of communication between people and their computers?
• Speech analysis: What computer programs are available to analyse speech signals? How can computer speech analysis help language learners?

As this course may include topics relating to Chinese Language Information Processing, students who have no prior knowledge of Chinese characters are advised against taking this course.