Minor in Computational Linguistics (Coming Fall 2026)

The minor in Computational Linguistics provides an understanding of the structure, function, and use of language, while gaining a valuable technological skillset that opens up career opportunities related to language technology.

The minor requires seven courses that give a basic foundation of linguistic theory, linguistic tools and methods, data science, and programming languages used for text and speech processing and analysis. Students will learn:

  • Principles of phonetics, phonology, syntactic grammar, and semantics
  • To write programs and process texts and speech in programming languages
  • To discover statistical patterns in linguistic data, identify frequency distribution, and perform tokenization
  • To extract meaning from texts
  • To apply various machine learning methods to data mining

*Students will be able to declare this Fall 2026.

Required courses (16 units)

COMP 110/L: Introduction to Algorithms and Programming and Lab or COMP 102/L: Programming for Data Applications and Lab (4)

PHIL 230: Introduction to Formal Logic (3)

LING 300: Introduction to Linguistic Analysis (3)

COMP 310: Automata, Languages, and Computation or LING 455: Computational Linguistics (3)

MATH 326: Discrete Mathematics or LING 404: Syntax (3)

Choose two electives, one from each area: (6 units)

Linguistics Area A elective:

LING 303: Human Language: Defining Our Biological Identity (3)

LING 402: Phonetics and Phonology (3)

LING 404: Syntax  (3)

LING 408: Semantics and Pragmatics (3)

Linguistics Area B elective:

LING 309: Language and Social Interaction (3)

LING 441: Sociolinguistics (3)

LING 455: Computational Linguistics (3)

Total units for the Minor in Computational Linguistics: 22

For more information contact: Dr. Anna Joaquin

Note: LING 404 and LING 455 cannot be used to fulfill two requirements

Prerequisites for MATH 326 are: ECE 320 or PHIL 230; Completion of MATH 150B with a grade of “C” or better. (MATH 150B can be taken if MATH 150A is completed with a B- or better OR a 5 in AP Calculus AB or 4 in AP Calculus BC)