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: There are no prerequisites for this course. We will be using a tool called LightSIDE to train and test machine learned models for different predictive tasks. LightSIDE has a graphical user interface that makes it easy to do this without knowing how to program. That being said, knowing how to program (and manipulate text) may enable you to conduct more interesting experiments as part of your final project.
This course will involve understanding mathematical concepts and procedures. I will cover the basics in order for you to understand these. However, if you strongly dislike math and are unwilling to grapple with and ultimately conquer mathematical concepts and procedures, this may not be a good course for you.
Time & Location: M, W 1:25pm-2:40pm, Manning 014 (In Person).
Instructor: Jaime Arguello (email, web)
Office Hours: By Appointment
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 978-0123748560. Purchase online or Available for Free as an eBook through UNC Libraries
Additional Resources: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. C. Manning and H Schutze. 1999.

Introduction to Information Retrieval. C. Manning, P. Raghavan and H. Schutze. 2008.
Course Policies: Laptops, Attendance, Participation, Collaboration, Plagiarism & Cheating, Late Policy, Use of Generative AI Tools
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: Undergraduate grading scale: A+ 97-100%, A 94-96%, A- 90-93%, B+ 87-89%, B 84-86, B- 80-83%, C+ 77-79%, C 74-76%, C- 70-73%, D+ 67-69%, D 64-66%, D- 60-63%, F 0-59%

Graduate grading 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) are marked with a WFH below.
Lecture Date Events Topic Reading Due
1Mon. 8/17 Introduction to Text Mining: The Big Picture 
2Wed. 8/19 Course Overview: Roadmap and ExpectationsWFH Ch. 1, Mitchell '06
3Mon. 8/24 Predictive Analysis: Concepts, Features, and Instances IWFH Ch. 2, Dominigos '12
4Wed. 8/26HW1 OutPredictive Analysis: Concepts, Features, and Instances II 
5Mon. 8/31 Text Representation I 
6Wed. 9/2 Text Representation II 
7Mon. 9/7Labor Day (No Class)  
8Wed. 9/9HW1 DueMachine Learning Algorithms: Naïve Bayes IWFH Ch. 4.2, Mitchell Sections 1 and 2
9Mon. 9/14 Machine Learning Algorithms: Naïve Bayes II 
10Wed. 9/16HW2 OutLighSIDE TutorialLightSIDE User Manual
11Mon. 9/21Well-being Day (No Class)  
12Wed. 9/23Literature Review Proposal DueFinal Project Breakout Group Discussion I 
13Mon. 9/28 Machine Learning Algorithms: Instance-based Classification IWFH Ch. 4.7
14Wed. 9/30HW2 DueMachine Learning Algorithms: Instance-based Classification II 
15Mon. 10/5 Machine Learning Algorithms: Linear Classifiers I WFH 3.2 and 4.6
16Wed. 10/7 Machine Learning Algorithms: Linear Classifiers II 
17Mon. 10/12 Midterm Review 
18Wed. 10/14 Midterm 
19Mon. 10/19 Final Project Breakout Group Discussion II 
20Wed. 10/21HW3 OutPredictive Analysis: Experimentation and Evaluation IWFH Ch. 5
21Mon. 10/26 Predictive Analysis: Experimentation and Evaluation II Smucker et al., '07, Cross-Validation, Parameter Tunning and Overfitting
22Wed. 10/28 Predictive Analysis: Experimentation and Evaluation III  
23Mon. 11/2 Exploratory Analysis: Clustering IManning Ch. 16
24Wed. 11/4 Exploratory Analysis: Clustering II 
25Mon. 11/9 Sentiment AnalysisPang and Lee, '08 (skip Section 5 and only skim Section 6), Pang and Lee, '02
26Wed. 11/11HW3 DueDiscourse AnalysisArguello '15
27Mon. 11/16 Detecting ViewpointWeibe '10
28Wed. 11/18 Text-based ForecastingLerman et al., '08
29Mon. 11/23 Final Project Presentations I 
30Wed. 11/25Thanksgiving Break (No Class)  
31Mon. 11/30 Final Project Presentations II 
32Wed. 12/2Final Project DueFinal Project Presentations III