122251 AR Advanced Course in Linguistics (2020S)

This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of data science with a particular focus on applications in linguistics. Data science is the study of the methods and technologies required to gain insights from data. This subsumes the analysis of data to detect patterns and relationships among interesting variables (e.g. word frequency, class and length) as well as the training and usage of statistical models to make predictions (viz. machine learning; e.g. automatically predicting the author of a text).

This course is divided into four blocks, one per month: The first part provides an introduction to data types and descriptive statistics. The second part introduces techniques from text mining and natural language processing. In the third part, we will cover basic methods of statistical inferential modeling (univariate and multivariate linear and logistic regression), which are useful to study relationships among certain properties in your data (variables/features). In the fourth and final block, we will study techniques from machine learning and predictive modeling (unsupervised and supervised). We will apply these techniques to hands-on use-cases like (automatized) word classification or sentiment analysis of texts.

In this course, we will make use of the scripting language R together with its frontend RStudio. Both are pre-installed on the computers in the lab, but you might want to install them on your own computers as well (e.g. for doing the exercises at home). You will learn how to use R as we go along. Further instructions and literature will be provided on Moodle.

This is an introductory course. As such, no previous knowledge of statistics, statistical software, machine learning or programming is required, but a solid knowledge of high school mathematics (at least Unterstufe) will prove useful (linear functions, basic arithmetic operations, fractions, percentages, probability etc.). Since this course is aimed at a linguistically trained audience, I will take knowledge of fundamental linguistic concepts for granted.

UPDATE: The first sessions of the course will be conducted via moodle. There will be online tasks, discussions and online conferencing sessions in which we discuss exercises in R.