This course offers an introduction to the computational perspective in language studies as well as to techniques and tools used in the field Corpus Linguistics. Corpora, i.e.,
large archives of linguistic data (such as texts and speech transcriptions) that can be collected and analyzed using computational tools and methods. Through a combination
of lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, this course will give students an introduction to the skills necessary for computer-aided text manipulation.

The course is designed to increase awareness of computational and corpus tools and their applications for linguistic research. It provides ways to learn about various tools to at least partially automate or accelerate linguistic analysis, providing students with a greater understanding of how and when to use empirical approaches to linguistic analysis. A large emphasis of the course is in how to deal with large amounts of language data and to
understand practical issues in dealing with corpora, annotation and multi-lingual data. It covers computer methods for doing linguistics with on-line corpora.

At the end of the course, students will have learnt basic aspects of the computational perspective on language, focusing on the preprocessing, markup and annotation of English computer corpora, as well as on the handling of corpus analysis and query tools for the extraction of linguistic information from machine-readable datasets.

Unit 1: Introductory Issues: Definitions and approaches. What is a corpus? What is corpus
linguistics?
Unit 2: Corpus types and corpus design
Unit 3: Corpus data: processing and compilation
Unit 4: Corpus querying (concordancing)
Unit 5: Querying mega corpora with online interfaces