06450 - Applied Linguistics

Academic Year 2018/2019

Learning outcomes

The course will provide the knowledge related to the basic processes and methodologies on corpus building and on automatic text processing.

Course contents


APPLIED LINGUISTICS - 6 CFU:

- CORPORA

  • What is a corpus, how to use it and the kind of information it provides.
  • Parameters for corpus design. Representativeness.
  • Syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis.
  • Concordances, collocations and lexical association indexes.
  • Annotations
- CORPUS LINGUISTICS FROM A TECHNOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW.
  • Electronic texts, coding, mark-up format and conversion methods.
  • How to collect electronic texts.
  • Corpus access and text retrieval.

- Case study: the corpora CORIS/CODIS, BoLC e DiaCORIS
- Web as corpus.
- Laboratory: querying a tagged corpus.

- LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ADVANCED ENVIRONMENTS.


APPLIED LINGUISTICS - 12 CFU:

Add the following contents to those of 6CFU:

- LABORATORY: CORPUS DESIGN AND BUILDING.

- NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

  • Phonetics: Speech sample parameters - phones and formants - frequency analysis - suprasegmentals.
  • Morphology: Analysis and generation.
  • Syntax: Part-of-speech tagging - parsing and formal grammars.
  • Semantics: lexical semantics - Wordnets.
  • Laboratory of computational linguistics
  • Laboratory of machine learning

Readings/Bibliography

Students ATTENDING the lessons

Some chapters (clearly indicated on the course web site) extracted from:
- Lenci, A., Montemagni, S. and Pirrelli, V. (2005). Testo e computer, Carocci.
- McEnery T., Wilson A. (2001). Corpus Linguistics, Edinburgh University Press.
Slides, handouts and papers downloadable from the course web site.


Students NOT ATTENDING the lessons

Add the following book to the readings for students attending the lessons:
- Cresti E., Panunzi, A. (2013). Introduzione ai corpora dell'italiano, Il Mulino.

In any case, students not attending the lessons are strongly invited to contact the teacher to get some explanations and avoid any misunderstanding about the course contents and reading materials.

Teaching methods

Face-to-face classes for 60 hours (12CFU) or 30 hours (6CFU). Inside the 60 hours of the 12 CFU course, students will make a small project using the computer lab. under the teacher supervision.

Assessment methods

The exam consists of an oral colloquium on the course contents designed to evaluate the critical skills and methodological knowledge gained by the student.

Reaching a clear view of all the course topics as well as using a correct language terminology will be valued with maximum rankings.
Mnemonic knowledge of the course topics or not completely appropriate terminology will be valued with intermediate rankings.
Unknown topics or inappropriate terminology use will be valued, depending on the seriousness of the omissions, with minimal or insufficient rankings.

It is compulsory to register for the exam using the online procedure.

Teaching tools

The course web site is the central point for any kind of information about the course. It contains the handouts and the readings discussed during the lessons as well as a rich software repository useful for laboratory practice.

A CD-ROM/USB key has been prepared for the students containing a complete computing environment to practice with the procedures proposed during the course. This tool will be used also in the laboratory sessions.

Links to further information

http://corpora.ficlit.unibo.it/LingAppl/

Office hours

See the website of Fabio Tamburini

SDGs

Quality education Partnerships for the goals

This teaching activity contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda.