 Which word of this is familiar with you, familiar to you? I mean in a way all the words should be familiar to you right, but which word of out of these three four makes more sense to you? Language, very nice I was expecting that. How about natural language? Any idea? Have you heard about any other kind of language? Which is? What is that called? Artificial, if we are talking about programming language, artificial language right. And what is artificial about programming language? Manmade, humans have invented and do people speak that? No, so right in the beginning I want to draw your attention to this thing. Natural language means the language that people speak. This is not directly in opposition to what we know as artificial language. Artificial simply means the languages or language that machines communicate with. Am I right about the programming language? Only machines understand that language and some people who write that, who write several things using that language. People do not speak that language right. All right, so that is the part of natural language. Principles and parameters I am coming to you in a few minutes. So that is about the name of this course. Here is little bit of details about me and the course evaluation. My name is Rajesh Kumar. I teach in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. My office is located in 3, 4, 5 HSB. These are my phone numbers, office number and mobile number and my email address. This is the objective of this course. I must tell you right in the beginning. This is what we are going to do throughout this semester. It is in short if I have to summarize everything that I have to do, I can talk about it in two sentences that we are going to talk about some fundamental ideas of ideas about how we study language and again when we talk about language we mean natural language, language that we speak. We will be talking a lot about that. We will be setting up several parameters with that but keep in mind when we, there is something else which is obvious when we say natural language. Natural language is not the language that is written. So we are not going to be discussing about textbook language or written language. We are only going to be talking about spoken language which is natural language that people speak and particularly how we study that and how we learn language is going to be part of that and then we will be looking at that at the level of sounds, words and sentences. In particular we will be looking at sentences that is language at the level of sentences. Since we are beginning with language and its fundamental ideas we will briefly go through sounds, words but we will be spending most of our time at the level of sentences. Again I have listed some of the topics that we will be discussing. You are more than welcome to take a look at these topics. There are 12 of them and again I am going to send you these topics and we will stick to these topics. I will try to cover each one of them in a week. So far I have a design for 12 or 13 weeks. I have kept one or two weeks free if we need more time to spend on a topic we can, we should have scope for maneuvering. So we will begin with general things like what is language and linguistics and how we study them, how we learn a language in the first week and then we go on and on to look at, in the second week or so we will look at language at the level of words and sounds and words and then soon after we will be going at the level of sentences. So these are the 13, 12 or 13 topics that we will be looking at. These are the two text books which we will be using for this course. I have not listed them in chronological order. Calicovers book is more recent that was published in 2009. However, I have put them in the order of priority. A more important book for this class is going to be Lillian Hegman's book what is known as introduction to government and binding theory. It is a voluminous book. It should be available online too. However, both the books are available in the library. Please try to, last year or sometime somebody had sent me a link of this thing available online. I do not have that link ready. Please find it out for yourself and if you find a PDF link for either one of the two books or both the books send that to me too. But whether you need a hard copy or a soft copy do get hold of these books. These are the two books we will be using for this class and most of the topics that I have shown you and that we are going to be discussing you will find in these two books. So let us look at some of the preliminary things that we started discussing with the name of this course and even before I look at these things I wanted to ask you this question what were you looking forward to when you walked into this course, when you registered for this course? What did you think you will be learning? Again if this was the first year class or second year I would have framed this question differently but let me ask you this question directly. Since you have gone through several classes can I get some of responses? What do you think you were expecting when you registered for this course? Did you have any idea when you registered for this course? What will be this course about? What are your majors? How many of you are from electrical engineering? Computer science? Nobody? So electrical engineering and mechanical right? Nobody from computer science? So and rest of you are from mechanical engineering? Error space and others? Anybody else from other department? Error space, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering? Can I conclude with these three or anything else? Now so I am still waiting for your response or you were just how do you get into this kind of class? Do you choose or you have been sent? You have chosen this class. Then it is more relevant a question. So when you had an option to choose for this class? I am not asking you why you chose this class. That is not very important. After you chose this class what did you think you will be learning in this class? And please do not tell me the things that you have seen on the slides. Just tell me what you thought. It cannot happen. You know why I am asking you this question? It cannot happen that you did not think. This is not a class on advanced applied mechanics or some obscure topic of either electrical engineering or mechanical engineering. This is something different from what you do in general, what you do or what you have been doing regularly right? I am only trying to try to understand it. Repeat my questions again and again. Please tell me. No? Are you saying that you did not think about anything? You thought about nothing? Tokenization and stemming of words. Tokenization and stemming of words. That is how words are built. All right. Processing natural language. All right. Someone else? That is how we learn language. Anybody else? Our natural language comes to be more. English pronunciation is difficult to navigate through. I think I can understand the nuances of pronunciation through this question. All right. More? No. I get an idea. However, before I begin saying something, I must tell you, you will need to speak. Despite of cameras around, I will make sure that you speak. It does not happen that you do not speak and I continue giving you a monologue from here. Like I said, this is going to be something new for you, something that you do not do on your regular schedule. So, it is important for me to make sure that you understand what I am saying. Only then we move further together. There is no point me going from one topic to the other without taking you together. That is one of the things which is going to be important for me and I will try to make sure. I will need your help. The reason why I am saying this is I will need your help for that. Please talk and let me know that you understand not only on quiz 1, quiz 2 and final exams on a regular basis so that we move together. The things that you mentioned, we will be talking about all of them for sure. I am positive even though we are not going to be talking about directly, talking about how to improve your vocabulary or pronunciation directly. It is going to, if you pay close attention to some of the things that is going to help you for sure. And also it is required for me to tell you most of the things that we are going to be discussing here are going to be helpful in understanding how natural languages are processed through machines. But how we cut words in smaller pieces, we will be talking about that from the perspective of natural language but not from the perspective of processing in a machine. So, that will be left to you to use what you learned here and how you use them for processing them in machine. Let me say a sentence or two about that. I have been interacting with many people, not lot of them who are working on this campus on natural language processing but in other places. And to tell you the truth honestly I have not worked on natural language processing myself. However, I know about the field and I am familiar with the discussions in that field. We deal only, we deal with natural language and when it comes to the use of understanding how language works. I am using a broad term how language works and application of all that to make an intelligent machine. I think you understand what I mean by intelligent machine and as you know in the last not even 20 years, 15 years or so or even 10 years. If you look at machines 10 years ago and you look at machines now, we definitely find much more intelligent machines beginning from a mobile phone to camera or computers. In all these things, the contributions of computer scientists, people working on natural language processing and to be modestly acknowledging people working with natural language as well, they have a huge contribution in that. However, when it comes to the interaction between language and machine, as you know, machines work with artificial languages. One of the goals of scientists and particularly computer scientists and people working with language whether they are working on natural language processing or natural language itself or machines in general computer scientists, one of the goals in the modern time. It has been a goal since last 50 years and it is going to continue for another 50 years or I hope until people have achieved that. To design a machine which works the way humans do, particularly a machine that works the way human mind does, we will be taking up a couple of topics to see how human mind works and as a matter of acknowledgement, we do not have machines that work like human minds. We do have machines that work to a great extent. We can press one on phone or say one on phone and the machines are capable of transmitting that verbal signals into electrical ones and transmit it to another machine and get you some more relevant information. We have seen this thing in a variety of ways in our lives nowadays. This has changed many industries. However, we need, people need to work on that a lot and probably I will talk about couple of topics of that too but mostly we will be moving around natural language and how that works, how we learn and what it is anyway. So let us start with this with couple of fundamental questions and these are whether we are talking about principles and parameters of natural language or any course related to language these are some of the elementary questions we need to understand and answer. Have you heard this word linguistics? What does it mean? Study of languages. Now we will refine that in a moment but you are right, you are right. Anybody else? I think that that is about it, that is in short it means it is a discipline. Which studies language? We will talk about language in a moment. If I ask you a question, what is the difference between language and languages? Besides being, besides the distinction between singular and plural, what difference, what does it mean to you? Language and languages. Like we understand the distinction between artificial language and natural language, at least on the first day of this class I want you to understand the difference between language and languages and then it will make more sense when we discuss things further. Any idea? No? If I ask you, how many languages do you speak? What is going to be the answer? How many languages do you speak? What is your name? Manoj. Manoj, three. So such as Tamil, English and Hindi. Tamil, English and Hindi. You? Two. And your name? Ali. Ali. And they are? English and Hindi. Four. And your name is? Rishabh. Rishabh. And the languages are? Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. But that is only three. English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Great. Is there anyone here who speaks just one language? Should I take it as no? Right? Do you know anybody? These are very general and broad questions that I am asking you and I ask you just not, not just like that. I do want you to think about these things as well. Do you know anyone who speaks just one language? Yes? Sure. Who do you think speaks just one language? Somebody said yes? They said. My grandmother speaks only one language. Grandmother speaks just one language. Which is? Telugu. Telugu. You? I speak English, Hindi and Telugu. English, Hindi and Hindi. Right? Anyone else who knows someone who speaks just one language? Animals. Is that what you said? And your name said? Bala. Bala. Which language? Which animal do you know which speaks just one language? Tell me the name of animal. I mean you can, you can just say anything. Every animal, every animal. D.A. I mean you have to talk to them somehow. So which language do they speak? I am not, I am not. Please don't get me, you know. I am not trying to make fun of you. Just generally ask them which language do they speak? I don't know. You don't know. Right? But you are sure, if you don't know then how are you sure that they speak just one language? I am saying. All right? It's interesting. Do you understand? Understand this thing? Which simply means we need to understand at one point the difference between how humans talk or communicate or maybe how animals communicate. Are there similarities between two types of communication system? Are they totally different? At this time it will be safe to assume that they are different because we don't understand. Right? Do we, do you understand what they say? They sound all, all, all the deer that you find on this campus or anywhere else probably they sound same. But do they sound like us? So there, there is definitely, definitely a difference between us and them. So that, that will be one of the things at, at one point. I, I had that topic listed the difference between human and non-human communications but I, I deleted however I will talk about that at one point in time. So, yeah, what? The human languages too, right? Assure, definitely. So, so we can restrict that further by verbal language. Or when we say natural language that the verbal part of it is embedded in that sign language or body language or of course we have ruled out artificial language or my point is other types of communications are out of it. Now, body language, sign language, all of them are, all of them are also part of language that we speak. Right? It's not that if we speak a natural language, we do not use body language or we don't use symbols or signs. They, they are all together, combined. However, A we will be talking about only natural, natural language part of that and B there is no denying of the role of sign language or body language in our communication system. They play a huge role, huge, huge role in that. In fact, I have studied something which is not very authentic scientific research. It says when we talk to one another, right? More than 50 percent of communication comes from nonverbal means of, more than 50 percent of what you understand out of that communication comes out of nonverbal part of, part of it. And I am being modest in saying 50 percent. They go all the way of saying 80. That's difficult for me to understand little bit and, and then there is another professional ethical problem that if only 20 percent comes from natural language, then are we spending that much time on just 20 percent of it? It's, that doesn't sound right, but nonetheless that's, that's very interesting conclusion. So, as, as you see here coming back, we speak several languages, right? And if I, if I take a summary of that, let's say Hindi, English, English is definitely part of everybody's answer. Hindi may be part of lot of people's answer. Tamil, Telugu, right? And maybe few more languages either as replacement of these two or in addition to these two. Am I right? Now, so when we say, let's say four, five of these languages, I'll, I'll come back to more questions, more related to that later. Are there similarities between these languages? Now, we are talking about Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam. Any other languages represented here? Kannada, in the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, in the English. Anything else? Marathi. Marathi, very nice. Any, any, anyone else? Speak fast. Anything else? Just, just I'm, that's not important for the, for, for me to figure it out at this time. Just generally curious in the name, in names. Any, anybody? Rajasthani, Madhavari, no. All right. So, any, do you find anything similar in these languages? You don't, we, we don't have time for answer for that question. We'll, we'll answer this question slowly, later. Are these languages different from one another? Yes? Yes. Very different, right? So much so, that a Telugu speaker may have difficulty understanding Malayalam, right? Or Hindi speaker definitely has difficulty understanding Tamil, right? At the same time, Tamil speakers are understanding either Kannada, Malayalam or Telugu or any other language. My point is, there exist differences among languages, right? At the same time, there are similarities among these languages, right? When, when you hear someone speak Hindi or Tamil, right? And you are not the speakers of these languages, do you, you will definitely find something familiar, even though you don't understand much. Is this point clear to you, right? Now, I'll stop by making two points and then we'll continue with the rest of the things later. The two points that I am trying to make is, which are related to the other two, other part of the title of the course. Languages that we speak are for that matter that anyone speaks in the world. We are not only talking about five, six languages, we are talking about all the languages of the world that people speak. There are similarities among all of them. All of them at one level or at many levels are similar to each other. The way they are similar to each other or the reason why they are similar to one another is because they follow certain principles, okay? So, that's the principle part of language. And the differences that you find among languages, they are, they are located around parameters, okay? Because, because lot of, there are lot of parameters, parametric differences between one another. Therefore, they are different from one another. So, the principles and parameters part means, principle and parameter part means the following. Languages are similar to one another, following certain fundamental principles, following certain universal principles. At the same time, along the lines of certain universal parameters, languages are different from one another, right? It's a, a natural question comes to mind when we talk about language is, if languages, if, if the purpose of language is to talk, is to communicate, wouldn't it be easier and nicer if all of us spoke just one language, right? Then for a, the, the problems that a Hindi speaker may be, may be interacting with while talking to Tamil speakers or vice versa would not exist, right? We don't have to learn English. We don't have to worry about pronunciations, right? We don't have to worry about many things. Even though that will be easier, we don't have that. Then the, the, the naturally the question comes, which you were asking about evolution of language, why do we speak so many languages? If that's, if that creates some or many kinds of difficulties or, I, I don't want to say confusion, but difficulties, then why do we speak so many languages? Get this question? So, I, I just want to give you these questions to think about them and we will answer some of, some of them, lot of them over a period of time. This is the other part of that. Yeah, one more in the next one minute. I'll wind it up. The, there is a difference between the two words that I told you, language and languages. When we say language, we are talking about common things among all the languages, okay? We are talking about fundamental principles of language. We are talking about underlying, underlying system of languages, right? For, for example, lot of you are mechanical engineers from Applied Mechanics. If we say car, what's the fundamental principles driving all the cars? Beginning from Tata Nano to Rolls Royce or Mercedes or any other cars that you know. What's the fundamental thing? Fundamental thing that is common among all of them? Ambush, right? I expected that answer from you besides the steering and other things. That's not an answer we expect from engineers. So, auto combustion engine is the fundamental thing, right? Without that principle, no, we don't have a car. We don't have a machine that drives a vehicle, right? So, like you find something common among all the cars when we say cars. When we say car, we don't mean Mercedes or Tata Nano, right? And I'm, I'm not, I'm, I'm giving you these two names only for two extremes. I'm not talking about the value of, value of cars. In short, similarly, when we say languages, we mean all these names that you have mentioned or many others that we haven't or that we don't even know the names of. However, when we say language, we mean fundamental underlying principles, all the languages of the world. I have already drawn your attention to that. Such things are called principles underlying language. We will be discussing with that. So, this, this making sense, the difference between language and languages, right? difference between artificial language and natural language and to some extent things that we are going to be doing. And so, we, we stop here.