Data Analytics and Computation 758 - Text as Data

With the recent explosion in availability of digitized text, social scientists increasingly are turning to computational tools for the analysis of text as data. In this course, students will first learn how to convert text to formats suitable for analysis. From there, the course will introduce and proceed through tutorials on a variety of natural language processing approaches to the treatment of text-as-data. This will include relatively simple dictionary approaches for measurement, supervised learning approaches for document classification, vector representations, contextualized embeddings, and more.

Open to Masters DACSS students and SBS grad students. Fulfills a technical elective requirement for MS DACSS program. This course assumes a working knowledge of R. If you do not have sufficient background in R (e.g., have not already taken and passed DACSS 601 Data Science Fundamentals or an equivalent), please contact the instructor before enrolling. Please contact the instructor (or DACSS@UMass.edu if no instructor assigned) if you would like to enroll in this class but are not in one of the eligible groups.