Text Mining and Natural Language Processing

Course Description

Students collect and analyze unstructured text data using web/API scraping methods, and then analyze their corpus using text mining and natural language processing. Additionally, students conduct a survey of relevant issues pertaining to privacy rights and intellectual property rights for web scraping and text mining methods.

Syllabus

Student Learning Outcomes, Goals, Objectives:

Students successfully completing this course will be able to:

  • Explain foundational concepts and applications of text mining and NLP.
  • Collect, clean, tokenize, normalize, and linguistically annotate text data.
  • Represent text using Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF, n-grams, and embeddings.
  • Build and evaluate machine-learning models for text classification and sentiment analysis.
  • Apply topic modeling, clustering, named entity recognition, and information extraction.
  • Explain neural sequence models, attention, transformers, and pretrained language models.
  • Use Generative AI and LLM tools for prompting, semantic search, and basic RAG applications.
  • Evaluate NLP systems for accuracy, bias, privacy, hallucination, and responsible use.

Course Grading Information:

Activity/Performance Measure Percentage/Points
Programming Assignments: Applied text-mining and NLP exercises 30%
Quizzes and Discussions: Concept checks and course discussions 15%
Midterm Exam: Assessment of core NLP concepts 20%
Final Project Report and Code: End-to-end NLP application 25%
Final Presentation: Project presentation and demonstration 10%

Attendance/Participation:

Attendance/participation is not a graded component included in the student's final grade for this course.

Course Materials Purchased by the Students:

No course materials are required.

Scholarly Perspectives

This course engages diverse scholarly perspectives to develop critical thinking, analysis, and debate and inclusion of a reading does not imply endorsement.