Natural Language and the Computer Representation of Knowledge
MIT's 6.863 is a laboratory-oriented course on building computer systems that process human language, covering the linguistic, cognitive, and engineering foundations behind their design. Lectures and lab assignments walk through parsing, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and students build working natural language processing systems rather than just studying theory, including projects on machine translation and language understanding. The course materials, published through MIT OpenCourseWare, include lecture notes, problem sets, and lab assignments covering topics from finite-state transducers to statistical parsing methods. It draws on both computer science and cognitive science, treating language processing as a problem that requires understanding how humans structure and interpret language as well as how to encode that structure computationally. No enrollment or certificate is offered; materials are free to use for self-study.