Fourth Year

Fourth Year is slightly more difficult than the previous three years. There is more practical work involved and your final Fourth Year Project must be developed and implemented. There is a lot of extra study involved. The teaching period is somewhat shorter than other years. It lasts 20 weeks in total.

Semester 1 is 12 weeks long, from 1st October to the 21st of December.
Semester 2 is 8 weeks long, from the start of January to the start of March.

6 subjects are taken for the whole year. Some last only for the first semester and some the whole year. There are two compulsory subjects and you must choose the other four subjects yourself. The final exams are in April.

The two compulsory subjects are:

• Programming Language Design and Implementation (LDI)

LDI covers the theories behind the construction and implementation of computer compilers.


• French /German /Spanish for Specific Purposes (Science)

It is in this class that our class (2001) designed and constructed this ACL website.

Two or more subjects must be chosen from the following list, depending on their availability:

• Machine Translation

The use of computers for automatic natural language translation systems.
• Speech Recognition

The analysis, recognition and production of speech using computers. Programs are developed to systhesise speech and allow computers to recognise spoken words.



• Corpus Linguistics

The study of language through corpus based research, a corpus being a collection of spoken and/or written text. It is based on the study of language in everyday use.


• Computational Semantics

This course is an extension of the second year course, Semantics for Natural Language Processing. It concentrates more on the integration of computer theory with linguistic theory.


• CALL (Compuer Aided Language Learning)

CALL involves the use of computers in learning a foreign language. This course involves the development and implementation of web sites designed to aid language learning.



 

There is a large choice for the remaining subjects. There are two areas:

Computer linguistic / Language orientated:

• Pyscholinguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• French /German/ Spanish Translation

Computers / Information systems:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Databases
• Multimedia
• ...and other subjects from the School of Computer Applications

Fourth Year Project

Students must also write and implement a significant final year project. This project is an extension of the Third Year Project researched during the ERASMUS year and it allows Students of concentrate on an area of interest to them. It involves a lot of research and individual work but by the end students have a good understanding of the whole software design and implementation process. There are four stages of development:

• The project proposal in November
• The functional specification in January
• The oral presentation in February
• the final demonstration in May