What did you say?

Computer Science and the study of language. At first sight they look completely different. A love of language versus a love of technology. How does that work? You might be surprised. There are simple links of course in that we make computers do our bidding by writing in programming languages. That means computer scientists need a very clear grasp of what language is all about. We increasingly need computers to understand our own languages too though and that leads to lots more links, from computers teaching themselves how to translate to humans doing puzzles to help them along. The Turing test: the ultimate test as to whether a machine deserves to be called intelligent is also really a language test...and can computers really invent their own jokes?

Here we explore these links and more, though with the usual cs4fn twist on things. Look out for the ways you can get directly involved in the research yourself.