Data Analytics and Computation 790T - Advanced Text as Data

Computational social scientists are increasingly leveraging the wealth of digital text along with powerful computing resources for the analysis of "text-as-data." In this 3-credit graduate course, we tackle advanced approaches for the systematic analysis of text, starting with general principles and progressing through a variety of approaches that better account for the complexity of text than simple bag-of-words models.. We'll explore more sophisticated representations like word embeddings, both static and contextual, and their applications in social science research. Throughout, we will build from an understanding of the underlying neural networks and deep learning techniques by creating our own models, before introducing transfer learning with pre-trained language models. The course concludes by focusing on how text is unlocking new possibilities in causal inference and careful research design.

Open to Graduate students only.