LN4002: Programming for Corpus Linguists

LN4003: Programming for Corpus Linguists

Module leader: Dr. Constantin Orasan
Semester: 1

The module will enable students to acquire basic and intermediate concepts of computer science and programming in Python. The module is intended for linguists and other non-computer-scientists who have no programming experience, but computer scientists interested in learning Python and how it can be used in corpus linguistics can also benefit from it. Its special focus will be on Python and how it can be used to solve problems from corpus linguistics. Topics to be covered include: how to analyse the problem to be solved, fundamental data types, control structures, functions, regular expressions, simple tokenization, arrays, dictionaries, files, and corpora. Laboratory sessions will give participants hands-on experience in writing simple Python programs. Formative assessment involving a mock in-class test will allow students to get feedback on their work before the final summative assessment, as well as gain an insight into the way the assessment will be structured.

At the completion of the module, the student is expected to be able to:

demonstrate a thorough understanding of basic and intermediate concepts of programming using Python
critically analyse approaches to programming for corpus processing
use and develop computational tools for practical tasks from corpus linguistics
evaluate, compare and critically analyse algorithms for corpus linguistics
plan, implement and support applications written in Python
recognise issues that need to be addressed during the development of computer programs for corpus linguistics