Sophmore Paper

Jeff Kaufman

I intend on completing an honors major in Computer Science and a course major and honors minor in Linguistics. These fields have an obvious intersection, Computational Linguistics, and I do intend to do quite a bit of work on that aspect. Natural Language Methods will be one of my two honors preparations for Computer Science, and my Computer Science thesis will likely be on computational linguistic research done during the summer of 2007 at Swarthmore.

The two fields are also more broadly related, both looking at systems of communication. In my freshman year I studied Mandarin Chinese, and the character system was one of the most interesting (and challenging) parts of the class. I took Logic not to learn logical reasoning but to learn logical notation and see how people used it. In Mathematics the notation is what interests me most, often more than the properties of the Mathematical objects themselves. To people in these fields this can appear as missing the point and focusing on the tool rather than its use, but it is the structure and development of these tools that interests me.

The courses I plan to take, then, are the following:

Semester	Department	Number	Course Name
Fall 2006	CPSC	40	Computer Graphics
	CPSC	65	Natural Language Processing
	LING	100	Thesis, two credits
Spring 2007	LING	43	Morphology and the Lexicon
	LING	61	Structure of Navajo
	LING	105/6	Seminar in Phonology or Morphology, one or two credits
Summer 2007	CPSC		Research at Swarthmore
Fall 2007	CPSC	27	Computer Vision
	CPSC	63	Artifical Intellegence
	CPSC	180	Thesis, two credits
	CPSC	199	Senior Honors Study
Spring 2008	CPSC	127	Advanced Perception, if offered
	LING	199	Senior Honors Study, one half credit