The course introduces the basic and advanced concepts and ideas in text mining and natural language processing. In this course, students will learn how to apply text mining methods on text data and analyse them in a pipeline with machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The course has a strongly practical hands-on focus, and students will gain experience in using text mining on real data from social sciences, humanities, and healthcare and interpreting the results.

Given the rapid rate at which text data are being digitally gathered in many domains of science, there is growing need for automated tools that can analyze, classify, and interpret this kind of data. Text mining techniques can be applied to create a structured representation of text, making its content more accessible for researchers. Applications of text mining are everywhere: social media, web search, advertising, emails, customer service, healthcare, marketing, etc. This course offers an extensive exploration into text mining with Python. The course has a strongly practical hands-on focus, and students will gain experience in using text mining on real data from for example social sciences and healthcare and interpreting the results. Through lectures and practicals, the students will learn the necessary skills to design, implement, and understand their own text mining pipeline. The topics in this course include preprocessing text, text classification, topic modeling, word embedding, deep learning models, and responsible text mining

The course deals with:

• Review the fundamental approaches to text mining
• Understand and apply current methods for analyzing texts
• Define a text mining pipeline given a practical data science problem
• Implement all steps in a text mining pipeline: feature extraction, feature selection, model learning, model evaluation
• Understand and apply state-of-the-art methods in text mining
• Implement word embedding and advanced deep learning techniques

The course starts with reviewing basic concepts of text mining and implementing advanced concepts in natural language processing. At the end of the week, participants will master advanced skills of text mining with Python.

Participants should have a basic knowledge and a motivation of scripting and programming in Python.
Application deadline: 11 July 2022

This course is part of a series of 5 courses in the Summer School Data Science specialisation taught by UU’s department of Methodology & Statistics.

More info and registration