Introduction to Text Processing and Analysis

Course title Introduction to Text Processing and Analysis
Course instructors Lucie Chlumská, Pavel Vondřička
Course description The main objective of the course is to provide beginner-level digital linguistics students with all the necessary information on text processing and analysis. Starting with basic topics, such as characteristics of a plain text format and the difference between data and metadata, the course goes on to explain the specifics of XML and different types of text annotation, to introduce the process of tokenization, segmentation and morphological analysis, to describe the limits and possibilities of syntactic and semantic tagging and, finally, to summarize the principles of CQL and corpus querying, including the use of regular expressions and querying parallel corpora.
Course objectives
  • To understand how computers work with textual data;
  • To distinguish between different data formats and extract textual content from them (e.g. using OCR);
  • To understand the specifics of plain text and XML formats;
  • To understand the principles and issues of text annotation, incl. morphological analysis, syntactic and semantic tagging;
  • To learn about available resources for text processing and analysis, including taggers and concordancers;
  • To be able to analyse existing as well as own corpora in a variety of available corpus-based tools;
  • To build complex CQL queries, including regular expressions and logical operators.
Topics covered
  • File formats related to textual data
  • Plain text: Encoding, data and metadata
  • Extensible Markup Language or XML
  • Regular expressions
  • Tokenization and corpus-data formats
  • Morphological analysis: principles and tools
  • Syntactic and semantic annotation
  • Corpus exploration and analysis
  • Querying corpus data with CQL
  • Text alignment and parallel corpora
Level Introductory
Modality Interactive presentations, audio & screen recordings, exercises, knowledge quizzes, readings
Time commitment 100 hrs
ECTS 4