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80608-01 - Lecture with practical courses: Natural Language Processing and Text Analysis (4 CP)
| Semester | fall semester 2026 |
| Course frequency | Irregular |
| Lecturers | Sepideh Alassi (sepideh.alassi@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | Course Outline: Anatomy of text, preprocessing pipelines, and the statistical properties of language. Word Meaning and Representation: Word embeddings, semantic similarity, and co-occurrence matrices. Language Structures: N-grams, POS tagging, dependency parsing, and Named Entity Recognition (NER). You will also learn how to train a custom NER model on your own corpus and evaluate its performance. Higher Level Semantics: Sentiment analysis and topic modelling. |
| Learning objectives | This course offers a practical introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and demonstrates how its core concepts can be applied using Python. Each day is structured into two parts: morning sessions provide a theoretical overview of key topics, while afternoon sessions focus on practical examples and hands-on exercises. You will work with widely used Python libraries, including TensorFlow, spaCy, scikit-learn, Keras, and NLTK, to gain both conceptual understanding and practical skills. |
| Bibliography | - Jacob Eisenstein, Introduction to Natural Language Processing, The MIT Press, 2019. - Hobson Lane, Hannes Hapke, Cole Howard, Natural Language Processing in Action: Understanding, Analyzing, and Generating Text with Python, Second Edition, Manning, 2025. |
| Comments | The course will take place on Thursdays 10:00-14:15. The classroom will be announced soon. The course will be highly practical; therefore, attendance is mandatory. Please bring your own laptop with Python 3.12 installed. I also recommend installing the PyCharm IDE to facilitate programming. The Professional Edition is available free of charge for students—simply register with your UniBas email address on JetBrains. Download link: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/ |
| Admission requirements | This course is designed for students with prior Python Knowledge, especially those who have completed the "Introduction to Python for Humanities" course 64429-01. The number of participants is limited. In case of over-subscription, students of Digital Humanities will be given priority. If you have not attended the mentioned course above but have experience programming with Python and know the basics, contact Dr. Sepideh Alassi to confirm that you meet the prerequisites of this course. |
| Course application | Students must register in ADAM. The number of participants is limited. In case of over-subscription, students of Digital Humanities will be given priority. There is a tutorial session accompanied with the course held on Friday afternoons (exact time will be announced soon). Participation is not mandatory but highly recommended. I suggest that the participants consider the tutorial session as well in the plannings for the semester if registered for this course. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Thursday | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
Dates
| Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday 24.09.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 01.10.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 08.10.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 15.10.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 22.10.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 29.10.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 05.11.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 12.11.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 19.11.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 26.11.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Thursday 03.12.2026 | 10.15-14.00 | Vesalianum, Seminarraum (O2.02) |
| Modules |
Modul: Digital Humanities, Culture and Society (Master's degree subject: Digital Humanities) Modul: Strategien des Digitalen (Master's degree subject: Media Studies) Module: Extension Social Sciences BA (Bachelor's degree subject: Political Science) Module: Introduction to Digital Humanities (Master's degree subject: Digital Humanities) Module: Societal Approaches (Master's Studies: European Global Studies) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | At the end of each session, students will get a set of exercises to solve in a group. The solutions should be submitted within two weeks. The evaluation of the course will be based on the solutions submitted to exercises. To pass the course 65% of the total points is required. There will not be any examination. |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | as often as necessary |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Digital Humanities Lab |