Written text contains a wealth of information that can be turned into research data to study almost every aspect of human behavior, human health and our society. However, converting text to usable data requires an understanding of standard techniques from the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). MIDAS and the AI Lab are jointly organizing a monthly series of NLP workshops during the Fall 2022 semester. The first installment is on Sept. 19, and the second installment is on Oct. 10. Each session does not directly depend upon information from previous sessions.

In the first workshop of the series, we will provide a broad overview of NLP and introduce basic concepts used in NLP, including keyword counting, sentiment classification, and topic modeling. Additional topics include how NLP can be used, what the data look like, what (social science) questions could be answered using NLP, and more.

The second session, on Oct 10, is titled "What's in Text Data?"
Written text contains rich information about human knowledge, opinions, and communication styles, but how do we extract insight about all this from the data? In this second workshop in the series, we will first introduce Jupyter notebooks, a popular platform for performing data science research. Then we will discuss how to choose a dataset for your research question, extract your own dataset from social media sites like Reddit and Twitter, and convert the raw text data to a usable format. We will then explore several methods to extract information and gain insight from text data, including named entity recognition and sentiment analysis.

Register Here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe7k0uvPClqJnyWAMlWBZWb3h1imP4rnbClkvoyQ6Mq7dh8Ow/viewform