Linguistics and AI

Introduction to Language, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University

Welcome! /ˈwɛl.kəm/

Welcome to the Pedagogical Uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) student research database, an initiative of the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University funded by the Initiative on Pedagogical Uses of Artificial Intelligence and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University.

Each semester, undergraduate students enrolled in Georgetown University’s introductory linguistics course explore computational linguistics and complete one of six projects designed to engage them with the field’s lingering questions.

How do we ensure that AI-generated text doesn’t reproduce biased or offensive language that we often encounter online?
How can linguists use their skills in phonetics and phonology (understanding the sounds of language) to train voice recognition software to understand and respond to the diversity of regional and global English dialects?
How can we improve the quality of machine translation, especially between worldwide languages like Spanish or Mandarin Chinese and regional, Indigenous, or endangered languages?
How can AI tools be implemented by grassroots Indigenous initiatives to better document their languages?

Through the Pedagogical Uses of AI initiative, our students grapple with these questions and more and share their research with the university more broadly at the end of the semester.

This repository was created in order to spread our exceptional students’ work more widely. In doing so, we hope to inspire professors and academics from other subjects in the humanities to consider how AI may be ethically used as a tool to engage students in the contemporary and pressing issues in their fields. By clicking on the links above, you can navigate a repository of undergraduate student work that explores themes that are at the intersection of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. We invite you to explore the following videos and engage with our students’ work.

In a spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration and to foster similar pedagogical uses of artificial intelligence in other educational settings, we also encourage you to contact us through the link at the top of the page to request our pedagogical materials and to share your own!