AI, Language, and Interaction

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

AI, Language, and Interaction examines how intelligent systems learn, represent, and use language, with a focus on the technical foundations of chatbots, task-oriented dialogue systems, and emerging LLM-based interactive agents. Bridging computer science and linguistics, the course explores parallels between usage-based theories such as Construction Grammar and the probabilistic linguistic patterns large language models acquire from text, while also addressing the limits of current systems in reasoning, grounding, and embodiment. Students will study how dialogue systems interpret context, manage interaction, and support real-world communication, with attention to future directions including multimodal and human-robot dialogue. The course is project-based, and final projects may take either a computational or a linguistic orientation, from building dialogue systems to conducting data-driven analyses of language and interaction. No formal prerequisites are required, but students should have prior coursework or a substantive interest in computer science, linguistics, or both.