NLP for Humanists: An Introduction to Key Concepts and Workflows
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The goal of this course is to introduce key concepts and workflows in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to humanities scholars who have little or no experience with the field.
Learning outcomes
At the end of this course, students will be able to:
- understand the fundamental principles of Natural Language Processing
- recognize the importance of annotation in computational approaches to language
- identify key components of NLP pipelines
Can computers understand language?
What happens when a panda walks into a bar wielding a gun?
In this video, we’ll start with a joke about a badly punctuated wildlife animal to think through some questions about language, ambiguity and why it may be difficult for computers to truly understand language.
EMBED VIDEO HERE
What is NLP about
Despite their linguistic and cultural naiveté, which we touched upon in the previous video, computers can help us do things that no other human can. In linguistics, they can help us collect and process large quantities of text – also known as copora – so that we can study language as an empirical phenomenon. And in the humanistic disciplines, they can help us identify patterns, trends, and structures across large collections of texts so that we can gain insights on a scale which would be impossible to achieve by reading each work individually.
A field of computer sciences called Natural Language Processing or NLP studies mechanisms and develops tools that can analyze human language in ways that are both meaningful and useful.
In the following video, you’ll learn about two fundamentally different kinds of NLP: one based on rules, and one based on machine-learning methods.
Understanding the difference between the two approaches is important for at least two reasons:
- it will give you a conceptual foundation to build upon in the rest of this curriculum; and
- it will help you better understand the transformative potential of machine learning methods and what all the hype is about.
EMBED VIDEO HERE