This final lecture of the course covered worked solutions to the two past exam question set as homework last Friday.
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Category Archives: Lecture Log
Lecture 20: Course Review
This afternoon’s lecture covered arrangements for the exam, advice on revision and preparation, as well as a summary of the course topics. Continue reading Lecture 20: Course Review
Lecture 19: chi² Testing on Categorical Data
Today’s lecture covered more on hypothesis testing, presenting the χ2 test and working through three examples: student Inf1-DA exam results in 2011, bigram frequency in the British National Corpus, and possible gender bias in student admissions to Berkeley in 1973.
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Lecture 18: Hypothesis Testing and Correlation
Where the last lecture was about summary statistics for a single set of data, we now address multi-dimensional data with several linked sets of values among which we might look for correlations. This leads into several more sophisticated questions which are key to the effective application of statistics: how do we identify potential effects like correlation; how do we know when we have found evidence for an effect; and what might this tell us about any causal connections?
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Lecture 17: Data Scales and Summary Statistics
This morning’s lecture gave a general overview of statistics and their role in analysing quantities of data. Most of the technical constructions — mean, median, mode, standard deviation — are probably familiar to many, but the setting for their application and the computational context may not be.
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Lecture 16: Vector Spaces for Information Retrieval
Today’s lecture presented various techniques to support effective information retrieval: the big bag of words model; term-frequency inverse document frequency (tf-idf); the vector space model; and cosine similarity for document ranking.
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Lecture 15: Information Retrieval
Following the rectangular tables of relational databases and the triangular trees of semistructured data, the remaining Inf1-DA lectures will address the representation and analysis of more unstructured data. Today’s lecture provided a brief introduction to the classic information retrieval task of searching a large collection of documents to find those that match a simple query.
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Lecture 14: Example Corpora Applications
Corpora are widely used for computational research into language, and for engineering natural-language computer systems. In linguistics, they make it possible to do real experimental science: to formulate hypotheses about the structure of languages, or changes in language between different places, times or people; and then test these on data. In building applications that handle text or speech, corpora provide the mass quantities of raw material used for machine learning and other algorithms.
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Lecture 13: Annotation of Corpora
Today’s lecture described some of the annotations added to text corpora, how they are generated, and some simple analyses; as well as indicating how these relate to applications such as empirical linguistics and the engineering of systems which work with natural languages.
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Lecture 12: Corpora
In literature a corpus (plural corpora) is a collection of written texts, in particular the complete works of a single author or a body of writing on a single subject. In computational linguistics and in theoretical linguistics a corpus is a body of written or spoken text used for study of a particular language or language variety. These corpora may be very large (billions of words) and provide the raw material for experimental investigation of real-world language use: the science of empirical linguistics.
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