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UCx: Text Analytics 1: Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Learn the core techniques of computational linguistics alongside the cognitive science that makes it all possible and the ethics we need to use it properly.

6 weeks
3–6 hours per week
Self-paced
Progress at your own speed
This course is archived
Future dates to be announced

About this course

Skip About this course

Introducing Natural Language Processing is part one of the Text Analytics with Python professional certificate (or you can study it as a stand-alone course). This first course introduces the core techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics. But we introduce these techniques from data science alongside the cognitive science that makes them possible.

How can we make sense out of the incredible amount of knowledge that has been stored as text data? This course is a practical and scientific introduction to natural language processing. That means you’ll learn how it works and why it works at the same time.

On the practical side, you’ll learn how to actually do an analysis in Python: creating pipelines for text classification and text similarity that use machine learning. These pipelines are automated workflows that go all the way from data collection to visualization. You’ll learn to use Python packages like pandas, scikit-learn, and tensorflow.

On the scientific side, you’ll learn what it means to understand language computationally. Artificial intelligence and humans don’t view documents in the same way. Sometimes AI sees patterns that are invisible to us. But other times AI can miss the obvious. We have to understand the limits of a computational approach to language and the ethical guidelines for applying it to real-world problems. For example, we can identify individuals from their tweets. But we could never predict future criminal behaviour using social media.

This course will cover topics you may have heard of, like text processing, text mining, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling.

At a glance

  • Language: English
  • Video Transcript: English
  • Associated skills:Scikit-learn (Machine Learning Library), Python (Programming Language), Cognitive Science, Text Classification, Text Mining, Natural Language Processing, Pandas (Python Package), Data Science, Computational Linguistics, Go (Programming Language), Machine Learning, Sentiment Analysis, Workflow Automation, Text Processing, Artificial Intelligence

What you'll learn

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1. Construct applications using unstructured data like news articles and tweets.

2. Apply machine learning classifiers to categorize documents by content and author.

3. Assess the scientific and ethical foundations of text analysis.

Module 1. Why Use Text Analytics?: Learn how artificial intelligence can help us work with language data

Module 2. Working with Text Data: Learn what language looks like to both humans and machines

Module 3. Text Classification: Learn how to use machine learning to categorize documents based on content, authorship, and sentiment

Who can take this course?

Unfortunately, learners residing in one or more of the following countries or regions will not be able to register for this course: Iran, Cuba and the Crimea region of Ukraine. While edX has sought licenses from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to offer our courses to learners in these countries and regions, the licenses we have received are not broad enough to allow us to offer this course in all locations. edX truly regrets that U.S. sanctions prevent us from offering all of our courses to everyone, no matter where they live.

This course is part of Text Analytics with Python Professional Certificate Program

Learn more 
Expert instruction
2 skill-building courses
Self-paced
Progress at your own speed
3 months
3 - 6 hours per week

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