Kohat University Of Science And Technology

Assignment
On
Applications/Uses of Computer in Literature and Linguistics

Course Code: CS-101

Course title: Introduction to Computing

Year semester date

2nd 3rd Oct 30, 2018

Submitted By: Submitted to:

`

Abdullah Mr. Ali Zeb

Reg# EN120172009 Lecturer
BS English Computer Science
 use of Computer in literature
It is clear that the advent of computers has so far had almost no impact on the mainstream
activities of producing, reading, or studying literary texts. This may be about to change. But Two
decades ago, when a few scholars in the United States and Europe began applying computers to
the study of literature, many of their colleagues reacted with disbelief, confusion and
disappointment.

What would the machines do? Count angels in Milton? Measure Hemingway's sentences?
That kind of scholarship, a lot of humanists believed, was dreary enough when done slowly and
without computers. Would mathematical profiles of style determine if St. Paul wrote the Epistles,
or if Thomas More wrote one of Shakespeare's plays? Several ambitious computerized studies
along these lines proved extremely controversial.

Now some of the major uses of computer in Literature are as following.

Change in Research Methods:

Yet computers have grown popular in a wide variety of relatively mechanical tasks. From
etymology to bibliography, from the analysis of words in foreign languages to the quick
manipulation of cumbersome texts, computers have made significant changes in research
methods.

Nearly all of ancient Greek, from Homer to sixth century A.D., is now available on
computer tape, and it can be manipulated with computer programs that elucidate grammar and
perform other analytic tasks.

The project's equipment includes a reading machine that scans printed documents and
automatically enters them into a computer, as well as laser printers and a computerized type font
that spews out Chinese and other non- Roman characters.
Identifying Stylistic Quirks:

Computerized literary studies are a notably international field. Last April, 120 experts from
Israel, Taiwan, Singapore, Western Europe and the United States gathered at Louvain-la-Neuve
in Belgium for a conference of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing, a mainly
European group.

Participants delivered papers on a computer study of royal English legal charters, on the
new French dictionary being produced in France with the aid of some 1,700 computerized
French literary texts dating back to the 17th century and on computerized stylistic studies of
William Blake, Thomas Carlyle, Emile Zola and Andre Gide.

For years, a band of computer scholars has been counting words, measuring sentence
length, figuring the ratios of unique words to common words and quantifying literature in dozens
of similar ways.

Work in Religious Texts:

The field is known as computer stylistics and, according to the scholar who spoke in
Belgium on the development of Carlyle's style - Robert L. Oakman, professor of English at the
University of South Carolina - there are important elements of style, such as Carlyle's penchant
for Germanic syntax, that computers pick up faster than readers.

''People are always asking me, 'So what?' '' Said Louis T. Milic, a professor of English at
Cleveland State University who has devoted years to the quantification of 18th-century English
literature. But Dr. Milic has stuck to his computer measurements.

Asked about non-computerized critics, Dr. Milic asserted, ''Most literary criticism of style
has been pretty subjective, intuitive, impressionistic and essentially not of much use.''

Few specialists in computer stylistics sound as radical as Dr. Milic, but they all defend the
potential value of their research.

An area of literature where computers are being used with more than average enthusiasm is
in the study of religious texts. Apart from the concordance to Wesley, huge quantities of
Mormon theological materials are being recorded and manipulated by computer scientists in
Utah, and at the University of Pennsylvania a group of scholars under the direction of Robert
Kraft, professor of religious studies, is computerizing the early Greek translation of the Old
Testament known as the Septuagint.

Text analysis:
With each year that passes more texts are becoming available to the scholarly community
in machine readable form, whether from text archives, such as the one maintained at Oxford
University, or commercial distributors such as Chadwick-Healey (of Cambridge), who have
released a comprehensive database of English poetry.[2] Users of such texts, however, are still
confined largely to a small and specialized research community, with the technical skills to make
use of electronic text. The notable absence so far of computer-assisted research in the leading
scholarly journals is one sign that the field is still marginal.

Willie Van Peer has pointed to a basic problem with the present state of text analysis
methods, which deal largely in counting words.[5] The quantification offered by text analysis
enables only relatively primitive methods of examination. The frequencies of words,
collocations, or particular stylistic features, tell us rather little about the literary qualities of a
text, since these aspects of a text find their meaning only within the larger and constantly shifting
context constituted by the reading process. Text as object (a pattern of words) is a quite different
entity from text as communication (a reader's interaction with a text).

This is not to argue that computer methods of analysis have no place: a number of
interesting studies could be cited to show the opposite, from Oakman's analysis of Carlyle's prose
style to Burrow's study of the idiolects of the characters in Jane Austen's novels.[6] The issue is
rather, that no paradigm shift (to use that much overworked concept) in our theoretical
understanding has been effected by our use of computer methods in literary scholarship. Nor is it
likely to occur until a much more refined and accurate understanding of human cognitive
processes is available, and of the process of literary reading in particular.

HENCE COMPUTER HAS TOO MUCH IMPORTANT IN FIELD OF LITERATURE, DESCRIBING

ALL USES OF IT, TAKE TOO MUCH TIME AND HARD WORK. IN SHORT COMPUTER IS
CRUCIAL OF STUDYING LITERATURE.
 use of Computer in linguistiCs
The global precept of massive movements of humans of diverse cultures, professions and
languages has engendered and is engendering a unitary linguistic cooperation, adoption and
adaptation. The accumulative aggregate of people’s choices from the Arabs to Chinese, Africans
to the Caribbean is English. Thus, there is an aggressive effort to learn the language in order to
acquire the functional proficiency prerequisite to their needs; which must be achieved with some
measure of accuracy in order to meet the international acceptability and intelligibility. In these
global movements and communication, the science of listening and speaking in English is of
uttermost prominence. The objectives of this paper are to introduce Praat as computer software
that can ease teaching phonetics, and how it can be used to teach the English phonology in such a
way as to make the teaching and learning engagements fun. This is achieved by explaining how
Praat is operated, giving a serialized content description of the computer program, and samples
of its products through screen captures. Secondly, corpora of the linguistic data of English,
which are analyzed with Praat are presented.

There are many use of computer in linguistics some of which as discuss below;

Use of Computer in Phonetics and Phonology:

Oral communication, without any doubt, is the first tale-teller of the linguistic background
of every speaker, as the ear immediately picks what is different, odd or strange from what it
normally hears. The written communication does not easily and quickly betray the linguistic
signpost of the speaker. The role of the phonologists is, therefore, to collect and collate the
different sounds that emanate from speakers for the purpose of understanding the sound system
of the spoken language.

While varieties of pronunciation are absolutely unavoidable, average intelligibility and

acceptability must not be compromised. More, importantly, is a measure of pronunciation
accuracy from the majors and experts in the English Language and English linguistics. To
maintain such a measure, courses are designed at the various levels of the undergraduate and
postgraduate programmers. Some of these are: Spoken English, Introduction to General
Phonetics and Phonology of English I and II, The English Phonology, Auto segmental
Phonology of English, Advanced Phonology of English, Advanced Phonetics, and Theories of
English Phonology. In order to learn these very well, there is a mandatory possession of a
specially designated and equipped laboratory (NUC, 2007) variously named: Language
Laboratory, Phonetics Laboratory, Central Sound Laboratory, or Digitized Linguistics Science
Laboratory. These laboratories may be analogue, Ana-digital, or fully digital; the most expected
this age. In the latter, most conspicuous are the lecturers’ and students’ consoles equipped each
with a computer, a pair of headset, and overhead loud speakers. Also, in each of the computers
are installed phonetic programs that are used to analyze digitized corpora. Some of these are: The
Audacity, Speech Filing System (SFS), ling WAVES, Speech Analyzer, and Praat.

Computational linguistics:
Computational linguistics (CL) is a discipline between linguistics and computer science
which is concerned with the computational aspects of the human language faculty. It belongs to
the cognitive sciences and overlaps with the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a branch of
computer science aiming at computational models of human cognition. Computational linguistics
has applied and theoretical components.

Seven Core Areas of Computational Linguistics:

 Machine Translation
 Speech Recognition
 Text-to-Speech
 Natural Language Generation
 Human-Computer Dialogs
 Information Retrieval
 Computational Modeling

Friendly Software should Listen and Speak:

Natural language interfaces enable the user to communicate with the computer in French,
English, German, or another human language. Some applications of such interfaces are database
queries, information retrieval from texts, so-called expert systems, and robot control. Current
advances in the recognition of spoken language improve the usability of many types of natural
language systems. Communication with computers using spoken language will have a lasting
impact upon the work environment; completely new areas of application for information
technology will open up. However, spoken language needs to be combined with other modes of
communication such as pointing with mouse or finger. If such multimodal communication is
finally embedded in an effective general model of cooperation, we have succeeded in turning the
machine into a partner.

Use of Computer in Developing Writing Skills:

Computers have a profound effect on all aspects of language learning and teaching and can
be used in developing writing skills. In this unit we discuss the use of computer to develop
writing skills. The unit consists of three sections, and in each section there are three sub-sections.
The first section deals with the basics/ fundamentals of a computer such as main components,
multimedia devices (hardware) and Internet, web-resources (software). In the second section you
have to deal with word processor and its various uses for developing writing skills such as
composing,/drafting, writing, revising, editing, spelling check. The third unit deals with email
communication and how it helps in developing communicative skills especially writing skills.
Since this unit is mostly practical oriented, it will be useful if you have access to a computer with
word processor.
References:
 Campbell, Colin. (1984, AUG. 2). Use of Computer as Literary Tool Gains.
Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/02/books/use-of-computer-as-
literary-tool-gains.html

 Demola, Jolayemi. (December 2013). Doing Phonetics with Computer. Retrieved

fromhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/275340562_DOING_PHONETICS
_WITH_COMPUTER_INTRODUCING_PRAAT_AND_ITS_APPLICATION_
TO_PHONOLOGY_OF_ENGLISH

 Beldiga M.Gh., Banari V. (2009, November). The role of computer in teaching-

learning process.

 Chris Manning. (1999, Feb. 7). Computer Application in Linguistics. Retrieved

from https://nlp.stanford.edu/manning/courses/compapp/