13018 - Applied Linguistics (1)

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: building and using a tagged corpus.


APPLIED LINGUISTICS - 12 CFU:

Add the following contents to those of 6CFU:

- 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
  

- LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ADVANCED ENVIRONMENTS.

Readings/Bibliography

Some chapters extracted from:
- Cresti E., Panunzi, A. (2013). Introduzione ai corpora dell'italiano, Il Mulino.
- Lenci, A., Montemagni, S. and Pirrelli, V. (2005). Testo e computer, Carocci.
- McEnery T., Wilson A. (1996). Corpus Linguistics, Edinburgh University Press.
Slides, handouts and papers downloadable from the course web site http://corpora.ficlit.unibo.it/LingAppl/.

Students not able to attend 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).

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 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