Reading and discussions of current developments and issues in linguistics. 

This course is not offered on a regular basis. The course offering for Spring 2027 is:

LING 4940/6940 AI 4900/6900

AI for Human Speech

Many of us now talk to AI systems every day: we speak, they listen, interpret what we say, and respond. But how can AI make sense of human speech? When and why does it fail?

This course introduces the foundations needed to answer those questions by examining both human speech as a signal and the computational systems used to process it. We will work with real speech datasets, explore different ways of representing speech, and learn how modern speech-AI systems turn those representations into predictions. By the end of the course, you will be able to navigate a speech-AI workflow, load and run existing models, perform inference, evaluate their outputs, and interpret where and why systems succeed or fail. Applications will include automatic speech recognition, health-related uses of speech, and other real-world speech technologies.