Introduction to Programming for NLP with Python

The core of the course consists of a series of Jupyter notebooks that combine examples of Python code with explanatory text. The notebooks provide demonstrations of simple language processing and the aggregation, analysis and visualisation of qualitative and quantitative data, including data from real language research, from CLARINO, and from other sources on the web. They also suggest exercises which should solvable on the basis of the given examples and explanations. The course also has an introduction into the challenges of multilingual processing.

Ideally, the course should be presented by a teacher and the exercises should be supervised, but the modules are also suitable for self-study. No previous programming experience is required, but some elementary knowledge and skills in the practical use of your computer, keyboard, web browser and file system, as well as some basal knowledge of linguistics and mathematics, are presupposed.

After taking the course, you will be able to:

• understand and explain simple Python programs for searching, manipulating, counting, analysing or visualising text or language-related quantitative data
• write small Python programs that search, manipulate, count, analyse or visualise text or language-related quantitative data
• write Python code that accesses data sources on the web
• break up a somewhat larger task into smaller steps that are manageable in Python
• explain and apply the rules of the Python programming language, including its main data types, programming constructs, and relevant modules such as NLTK and pandas.