99797 - Advanced Professional Skills Lab

Learning outcomes

The student knows the advanced techniques for language service provision in one or more professional settings; s/he is able to analyze and critically assess language services in one or more professional settings, and suggest improvement strategies; s/he is able to acquire further skills related to linguistics, translation and technology, as well as other disciplines of relevance to her/his studies, through interaction with professionals from a range of fields.

Course contents

The activities of this seminar revolve around the research carried out as part of a project that focuses on artificial varieties of language and issues of authenticity. Its objective lies in the creation of a general corpus representative of contemporary Italian from the 2020s, providing a FAIR language resource that can be used as a reference for human-authored texts at a time where AI language increasingly influences the language we are exposed to. The seminar reviews common practices and tools for corpus processing, along with key issues of research ethics and transparency.

Course participants will be actively involved in ongoing activities carried out within the project, including:

• Design of the corpus sampling frame;
• Data mining and processing;
• Contextual, structural and linguistic annotation;
• Corpus documentation and analysis.

The course is taught jointly with Daniele Polizzi.

Readings/Bibliography

• Crawford, W., & Csomay, E. (2015). Doing corpus linguistics. Routledge.

• Egbert, J., Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2022). Designing and evaluating language corpora: A practical framework for corpus representativeness. Cambridge University Press.
• McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.

Teaching methods

The seminar combines lectures and practice-based sessions.

Theoretical and methodological contents (e.g. on text processing, corpus building and documentation) are delivered through presentations by the lecturers.

The practical sessions consist of hands-on activities, which are carried out collaboratively in class or individually as assignments, and are followed by group discussion. The activities are aimed at constantly monitoring progress in the development of the research and technological skills that make the object of the seminar.

All students must attend Modules 1 and 2 on Health and Safety online.

Assessment methods

Assessment will be partly ongoing and partly based on a final project.

The ongoing assessment is based on observation of students' participation in the course activities (including assignments to be handed in during the semester).

The final project will involve text collection and data annotation, accompanied by a brief technical report.

Assessment criteria:

• 30-30L: very active participation in class and excellent project work, displaying very high technical quality, presented in a very clear and detailed way.
• 28-29: active participation in class and very good project work, displaying high technical quality, presented in a clear and detailed way.
• 26-27: constant participation in class and good project work, displaying adequate technical quality; some aspects of the presentation could be improved.
• 23-25: limited participation in class and fair project work, displaying technical shortcomings; some aspects of the presentation could be improved.
• 20-22: minimum participation in class; project work displays technical shortcomings; presentation has gaps or is unclear at several points.
• 18-20: almost no participation in class; project work displays several major technical shortcomings; presentation has many gaps and/or is mostly unclear.
• <18: no participation in class; project work severely below standard.

Teaching tools

Hardware: PC and overhead projector.

Software: Text editors to process textual data; software for corpus annotation and corpus consultation.

Office hours

See the website of Silvia Bernardini