Computational Modelling (Prof. Tang, Winter 2022/2023, Weds: 12:30--14:00)
Enrolment options
**Audience:** Students who would like to improve their employability by
learning a highly desirable skill. Students who would like to do any
English Linguistic courses with a quantitative component in the future.
It can also be beneficial to those who are more literature-based but
would like to do more digital humanities. Students who are interested in
Artificial Intelligence.
**Keywords:**
computational linguistics, quantitative analysis, language, linguistics, text-processing
**Description:**
Natural
Language Processing plays a big role in our digital lives. We will
demystify some of these everyday tasks that involve natural language
processing: such as spelling and grammar correction, document
classification, dialogue systems, machine translation, and forensic
linguistics. On the practical side, we will focus on applying
off-the-shelf tools that are often used in computational modelling of
language data. Armed with these skills, you will be able to model
language data quantitatively and ask measurable research questions.
By
the end of the course, you will learn how to perform i) pre-processing
of text files (cleaning up raw text files), ii) automatic linguistic
annotation, such as Part of Speech tagging (automatically adding labels
such as Noun, Adjective to each word), Name Entity Recognition
(identifying proper names, time, date, places, events) and Sentiment
(fear, anger, happy, surprise…) iii) the basics of classifying
documents, authors and sentiment.
Students will get insight
into how these systems work (and why it is still so difficult to do
natural language processing well). We also consider social and ethical
considerations such as privacy, job creation and loss due to language
technologies, and the nature of consciousness and machine intelligence.
** Requirement:**
You should bring a laptop computer with you, fully charged for each class.
Note
that the practical side of this course focuses on using NLP tools (such
as https://spacy.io/usage/spacy-101). While it will involve using the
programming language Python, it will be introduced as and when needed.
**Textbook:**
Dickinson, M., Brew, C., & Meurers, D. (2012). Language and computers. John Wiley & Sons.
- Teacher: Kevin Tang