Natural Language Processing for Computational Social Science

3 Credits.

Vastly available digitized text data has created new opportunities for understanding social phenomena. Relatedly, social issues like toxicity, discrimination, and propaganda frequently manifest in text, making text analyses critical for understanding and mitigating them. In this course, we will centrally explore: how can we use NLP as a tool for understanding society? Students will learn core and recent advances in text-analysis methodology, building from word-level metrics to embeddings and language models as well as incorporating statistical methods such as time series analyses and causal inference. The ePortfolio tag(s) on this course signify that there are one or more assignments offered in the course that provide students with the opportunity to be assessed for proficiency in completion of the relevant ePortfolio requirement(s).