Results of project

This is a book about Natural Language Processing. By "natural language" we mean a language that is used for everyday communication by human…

This is a book about Natural Language Processing. By "natural language" we mean a language that is used for everyday communication by humans; languages like English, Hindi or Portuguese. In contrast to artificial languages such as programming languages and mathematical notations, natural languages have evolved as they pass from generation to generation, and are hard to pin down with explicit rules. We will take Natural Language Processing — or NLP for short — in a wide sense to cover any kind of computer manipulation of natural language. At one extreme, it could be as simple as counting word frequencies to compare different writing styles. At the other extreme, NLP involves "understanding" complete human utterances, at least to the extent of being able to give useful responses to them.

Abstract Stylometric and text categorization results show that author gender can be discerned in texts with relatively high accuracy. Howe…

Abstract Stylometric and text categorization results show that author gender can be discerned in texts with relatively high accuracy. However, it is difficult to explain what gives rise to these results and there are many possible confounding factors, such as the domain, genre, and target audience of a text. More fundamentally, such classification efforts risk invoking stereotyping and essentialism. We explore this issue in two datasets of Dutch literary novels, using commonly used descriptive (LIWC, topic modeling) and predictive (machine learning) methods. Our results show the importance of controlling for variables in the corpus and we argue for taking care not to overgeneralize from the results.

What is Sociolinguistics and what it deals with. This video lecture is a part of the course 'An Introduction to English Linguistics' at t…

What is Sociolinguistics and what it deals with. This video lecture is a part of the course 'An Introduction to English Linguistics' at the University of Neuchâtel. This is session 20, which introduces the topic of sociolinguistics.