In today’s world, we expect the machines we use daily to understand our language. The scientific study of language, therefore, becomes essential for the development of increasingly “user-friendly” technology, enabling simple and intuitive human-machine interaction.
But how is language studied? What are the observable components of language and what role does grammar play? How do we communicate with computers?
We use puzzles and games to guide you through the main challenges of linguistics and its computational applications: from practical issues—like encoding sounds and characters—to theoretical reflections on the representation of linguistic meaning and its importance for artificial intelligence.

This laboratory was proposed here:

• In collaboration with Coling Lab (Laboratorio di Linguistica Computazionale dell’Università di Pisa) and ILC-CNR (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”), the laboratory was presented at Bright-Night 2020. slides
• In 2020 and in 2021, an online version of the laboratory has been attended by the students of the Istituto Tullio Buzzi di Prato as part of the school-work alternation projects. slides
• Festival della Scienza 2020: AILC presented a 45 minutes long laboratory for high school students titled Il linguaggio di Siri (online, video available)
• An interactive presentation based on the laboratory was presented by Gabriele at SISSA Student Day 2020: an orientation event for students of the last high school years.
• Bergamo Scienza 2019: we presented a 90 minutes long laboratory for students from aged 13 and over named Non dire málvísindi se non l’hai nel sacco.

All the materials of this laboratory are open source and reachable at bitbucket