Our project concerns Natural Language Processing. Because I have never taken an NLP course, I am using this Summer to do a literature review of books and papers written on the topic. I will be working with Maria Gini and one of her PhD students, Shana Watters, at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. They will help me find materials to study and offer explanantions on material that I do not understand. The goal is for me to gain an understanding the basics of computational linguistics so that when it comes time for me to write my personal statement for graduate school I can write it with both confidence and some degree of competance. I will be looking at the basics of Natural Language Processing so I can research automatic translation in graduate school. In addition to computer science I am majoring in French. I would like to combine both my passions for language and computing after I graduate in the Spring. To learn about machine translation I will be testing three online translation services with phrases from a textbook for a translation course I took for my French major. Back