Linear Algebra for Computational Linguistics
The linear algebra a computational linguist actually uses, built from arithmetic upward and carried through to the matrix operations inside a transformer. It starts below vectors — coordinates, exponents, logarithms, summation — because assuming a vector is foundational is exactly the assumption that strands a linguist who came to the field through language rather than mathematics. Every idea is introduced where it is first needed and paid off where it surfaces in practice: the dot product returns as cosine similarity, the transpose returns as QK^T, the spectral theorem returns as latent semantic analysis.
Updated Aug 21, 2026
