Prolog programming: a do-it-yourself course for beginners

This is a course that I will teach at the 16th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information which is going to take place in Nancy, France in August 2004.

It will be a hands-on programming course for students of linguistics who don't have any prior experience in programming. Its aim is to give linguists an impression of what it means to program and to show them how straightforward it is to do some interesting things (like writing parsers for small grammars).

According to the courses's aim, its focus will be on material that leads the students to practical programming. In the first three lectures I will cover the basics of Prolog (knowledge bases and queries, matching and proof search, lists). The last two lectures will be devoted to Definite Clause Grammars (DCGs).

Programming is something which cannot be learned without actually doing it. So, all course sessions will have a lecture part and a practical part. For the practical part, I will provide graded sets of problems: basic problems to reinforce what has been learnt in the lectures, and more advanced problems for those who want to go beyond that.

The course will be based on "Learn Prolog Now!" by Blackburn, Bos and Striegnitz, which is available at www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-now.

My name is Kristina Striegnitz. Look at my webpage for more information.