Com­pu­ta­tion­al So­ci­o­lin­guist­ics

Seminar, master, summer 2021, L.079.08008

• Instructors. Henning Wachsmuth, Milad Alshomary, Maximilian Spliethöver
• Location. Entirely online
• Time. Wednesdays, 16-18
• First date. April 14, 2021
• Last date. July 14, 2021

• July 15, 2021. All Seminar talks are over. The article writing phase has started.

Computational sociolinguistics investigates research questions from the social sciences through empirical analyses of natural language text. Input text includes online news articles, social media posts, forum discussions, and similar. The focus is not only on the employed natural language processing technologies, but also on the insights into social phenomena and dynamics, raising a particular need for output interpretation and visualization.

The aim of this seminar is to learn about basic ideas and recent research in computational sociolinguistics as well as to discuss the benefits and limitations of empirical text analysis on societal developments. Based on a few introductory talks, each participant will choose a sophisticated topic from recent related research. For this topic, knowledge from different literature has to be acquired and presented in a scientific talk. In addition, the topic has to be summarized and discussed in detail in a paper-like article.

Students learn about:

• Basics of computational sociolinguistics
• Research of the CSS group in this area
• Selected state-of-the-art research in detail

Students practice:

• Acquiring relevant literature and knowledge on a focused research topic
• Understanding key concepts and methods related to the topic
• Presenting the topic in short and in depth
• Writing a scientific text about the topic

Students are graded based on four tasks:

• Talk, 30–40 minutes (~50%)
• Article, 8 pages + references (~40%)
• Participation (~10%)

Each student is encouraged to meet with the instructor early enough before the talk and before the submission of the article, in order to discuss content and presentation.

Introduction:

• April 14. Organizational course information (slides)
• April 14. Introductory talk on computational sociolinguistics (slides)
• April 21. Overview of seminar topics (slides)
• until April 25. Participants choose topics 
• April 28. Topic assignment (see on PANDA)
• April 28. Introductory talk on scientific presentation (slides)

Long talks:

• May 19 — July 14. 16 Long talks (see on PANDA)
• May 14. Conclusion (see on PANDA)

Articles:

• until August 31. Submission of articles.

• Plagiarism information. UPB Plagiarism leaflet
• Slide template (optional). Power point template
• Article template (mandatory). Latex and Word template
• Student talks. See on PANDA