INLS 613: Text Mining

Objective: Gain experience with both the theoretical and practical aspects of text mining. Learn how to build and evaluate computer programs that generate new knowledge from natural language text.
Description: Changes in technology and publishing practices have eased the task of recording and sharing textual information electronically. This increased quantity of information has spurred the development of a new field called text mining. The overarching goal of this new field is to use computers to automatically learn new things from textual data.

The course is divided into three modules: basics, principles, and applications (see details below). The third part of the course will focus on several applications of text mining: methods for automatically organizing textual documents for sense-making and navigation (clustering and classification), methods for detecting opinion and bias, methods for detecting and resolving specific entities in text (information extraction and resolution), and methods for learning new relations between entities (relation extraction). Throughout the course, a strong emphasis will be placed on evaluation. Students will develop a deep understanding of one particular method through a course project.
Prerequisites: Students should have a reasonable background in programming in a structured or object oriented programming language, such as Java or C++. "Reasonable" means either coursework or equivalent practical experience. You should be able to design, implement, debug and test small to medium sized programs. If you would like to take this course, but do not know if you meet these pre-requisites, please send me an email.
Time & Location: M,W 2:00-3:15 pm, Murray G205
Instructor: Jaime Arguello (email, web)
Office Hours: T, Th 10:00-11:00am, Manning 305
Required Textbook: Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Third Edition) Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank, and Mark A. Hall. 2011. Morgan Kaufman. ISBN 978-0-12-374856-0. Available online or in the campus bookstore.
Additional Resources: TBD
Course Policies: Laptops, Attendance, Participation, Collaboration, Plagiarism & Cheating, Late Policy
Grading: 10% Class participation
20% Midterm Exam
30% Homework (10% each)
40% Final project (5% project proposal, 25% project report, 10% project presentation)
Grade Assignments: Letter grades will be assigned using the following scale: H 95-100%, P 80-94%, L 60-79%, and F 0-59%.
Topics: Subject to change! Readings from the required textbook (Witten, Frank, and Hall) is marked with a WFH bellow.
Lecture Date Events Topic Reading Due
1 Wed. 8/20   Introduction to Text Mining: The Big Picture  
2 Mon. 8/25   Course Overview: Roadmap and Expectations WFH Ch. 1, Mitchell '06, Hearst '99
3 Wed. 8/27   Predictive Analysis: Concepts, Features, and Instances I WFH Ch. 2, Domingos '12
4 Mon. 9/1 Labor Day (No Class) No class  
5 Wed. 9/3   Predictive Analysis: Concepts, Features, and Instances II  
6 Mon. 9/8 HW1 out Text Representation I  
7 Wed. 9/10   Text Representation II  
8 Mon. 9/15   Text Representation III  
9 Wed. 9/17   Machine Learning Algorithms: Naïve Bayes WFH Ch. 4.2, Mitchell Sections 1 and 2
10 Mon. 9/22 HW1 Due Machine Learning Algorithms: Instance-based Classification WFH Ch. 4.7
11 Wed. 9/24 HW2 Out, LightSIDE, train.csv, test.csv LighSIDE Tutorial LightSIDE User's Manual
12 Mon. 9/29   Weka Tutorial WFH Ch. 10 and 11
13 Wed. 10/1 Project Proposal Due Predictive Analysis: Experimentation and Evaluation I WFH Ch. 5
14 Mon. 10/6   Predictive Analysis: Experimentation and Evaluation II Smucker et al., '07, Cross-Validation, Parameter Tunning and Overfitting
15 Wed. 10/8 HW2 Due Predictive Analysis: Experimentation and Evaluation III  
16 Mon. 10/13 Midterm Review Midterm Review  
17 Wed. 10/15 Midterm Midterm  
18 Mon. 10/20   Exploratory Analysis: Clustering Manning Ch. 16
19 Wed. 10/22 HW3 Out Sentiment Analysis I Pang and Lee, '08 (skip Section 5 and only skim Section 6), Pang and Lee, '02
20 Mon. 10/27   Sentiment Analysis II Somasundaran and Weibe '10 (optional),
21 Wed. 10/29   Detecting Viewpoint Yano et al., '10, Weibe '10
22 Mon. 11/3   No Class No Class
23 Wed. 11/5 HW3 Due No Class No Class
24 Mon. 11/10   Text-based Forecasting O'connor et al., '10, Lerman et al., '08
25 Wed. 11/12   Text-based Forecasting II  
26 Mon. 11/17   Information Extraction and Relation Learning McCallum '05
27 Wed. 11/19   Information Extracting Using Bootstrapping Arguello and Callan '07
28 Mon. 11/24   Temporal Summarization Guo '13
29 Wed. 11/26 Thanksgiving (No Class) No Class  
30 Mon. 12/1   Student Presentations  
31 Wed. 12/3   Student Presentations  
32 Tue. 12/9 Project Report Due