Computational and Statistical Methods for Corpus Analysis

Catalog description

A hands-on introduction to the core and advanced computational and statistical methods for analyzing corpus data. APLNG 578 Computational and Statistical Methods for Corpus Analysis (3) This course will provide a hands-on introduction to the core and advanced computational and statistical methods for analyzing corpus data. Topics to be covered include basic UNIX tools and python scripting for text processing; state-of-the-art computational tools for automatic and computer-assisted corpus compilation and annotation; computational tools for querying and analyzing raw and linguistically annotated corpora; and statistical methods used in interpreting information extracted from text corpora. Prior experience in computational and statistical analysis is not assumed. By the end of the course, students will be expected to have a good grasp of the computational and statistical techniques necessary for processing, annotating and analyzing corpus data, and to be able to implement these methods in their own corpus-based research projects. This course will be highly applied, and there will be substantial opportunities for demonstrations, exercises, and discussions. Students will be evaluated on participation in in-class activities and discussions, completion of a series of lab assignments designed to help them practice the computational and statistical techniques introduced, and a final research project. This course serves as the methods component of the two-course sequence in corpus linguistics offered in the Department of Applied Linguistics.