Summer School “Computational Language Technologies for Medievalists”
Graz, 8-12 July 2024
Location: Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung
Universität Graz
A-8010 Graz | Elisabethstraße 59/III
The program offers a hands-on approach, providing practical tools and resources to enhance research in this specialized area. To foster a collaborative and enriching learning environment, the summer school will select 20+2 participants who will be divided into four groups, mixing individuals with varying levels of Python programming knowledge.
Daily Schedule
- 09:00-10:30 — Morning Session
- 10:30-11:00 — Coffee Break
- 11:00-12:30 — Mid-Morning Session
- 12:30-13:30 — Lunch Break
- 13:30-15:00 — Afternoon Session
- 15:00-15:30 — Coffee Break
- 15:30-17:00 — Late Afternoon Session
- 17:00-17:30 — Coffee Break
- 17:30-19:00 — Special Event or Keynote
- Evening — Reception or Social Activity
Day 1: Introduction to NLP and Text Analysis
09:00-10:30 Lucija Krusic (Univ. Graz): Python programming course for novice participant (technical)
Obligatory for Novice participants
This course introduces novice participants to the fundamentals of Python programming, covering topics such as data types, control structures, functions, and basic libraries. Participants will learn to write simple Python scripts and programs, enabling them to solve NLP-related problems through hands-on projects and exercises.
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Klara Venglarova (Univ. Graz): Introduction to NLP Methods
Obligatory for Novice participants
What are types and tokens? What role does a lemmatizer play? How can computers recognize names in text? This introductory course on Natural Language Processing (NLP) covers fundamental concepts and includes practical exercises to deepen your understanding.
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 Stefanie Dipper (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): Corpus Building
This session makes introductions to corpora and annotations, including the importance of various annotation types and methodologies for enhancing linguistic research through automated tools, with a focus on enhancing the usability and accuracy of linguistic data.
15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-17:00 Tamás Kovács (Univ. Graz): Introduction into our Working Environment (Colab, Data sets)
This introductory session will familiarize participants with our primary working environment, Google Colab, including how to access and manipulate datasets within this cloud-based platform. We will explore basic features of Colab notebooks, discuss data importation techniques, and demonstrate effective ways to interact with datasets to kickstart data-driven projects.
17:00-17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – Jean-Baptiste Camps (École Nationale des Chartes): Computational Methods and Medieval Manuscripts (Keynote)
The written culture of Antiquity and the Middle Ages has been transmitted to us mostly through handwritten documents. Contrarily to a widespread idea, a substantial part of it remains poorly known. Today, computational methods offer new windows into the cultures of the past:artificial intelligence allows to quickly transcribe and annotate vast collections of manuscripts, while quantitative analysis sheds light on the origin of the texts. In the future, methods akin to those of evolutionary biology or ecology could help understanding the macro-evolutionary processes leading to the survival or extinction of past works of literature and of wide swathes of our human cultural heritage.
Reception
Day 2: Topic Modeling
09:00-10:30 Gabriel Viehhauser (Univ. Vienna): Topic Modeling
with Martina Scholger,Teaching Assistants: Roman Bleier, Niklas Tscherne, Nicolas Renet, Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner
This segment of the course will delve into topic modeling, a method used to uncover hidden thematic structures in large text corpora. Participants will learn about different algorithms such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), and apply these techniques to real datasets to identify and interpret significant topics.
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Mid-Morning Session
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 Hands on with prepared task
15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-17:00 Hands on with own material
17:00-17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – Poster Session
Day 3: Named Entity Recognition
09:00-10:30 Ismail Prada (Univ. Bern): Named Entity Recognition
with Sandy Aoun and Selina Galka, Teaching Assistants: Roman Bleier, Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner, Niklas Tscherne, Nicolas Renet, Klara Venglarova
This session will explore Named Entity Recognition (NER), a crucial technique in natural language processing that identifies and classifies named entities in text into predefined categories such as persons, organizations, locations, and others. Participants will learn to implement and train NER models using popular libraries like spaCy and NLTK, and apply these models to extract structured information from unstructured text data.
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Mid-Morning Session
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 Hands on with prepared task
15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-17:00 Hands on with own material
17:00-17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – Poster Session
Social Dinner
Day 4: Text Reuse and Authorship Analysis
09:00-10:30 Jeroen de Gussem (Univ. Gent): Text Reuse / Stylometry
with Tamás Kovács, Teaching Assistants: Bernhard Bauer, Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner, Niklas Tscherne, Nicolas Renet, Klara Venglarova
This course module will cover text reuse and authorship analysis, focusing on techniques to detect instances of text borrowing and to determine authorship in various texts. Students will explore algorithms such as cosine similarity, Jaccard index, and stylometric analysis, applying these methods to literary works and academic papers to identify patterns of reuse and attribute texts to their likely authors.
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Mid-Morning Session
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-15:00 Hands on with prepared task
15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-17:00 Hands on with own material
17:00-17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – Poster Session
City Tour
Day 5: Future Directions (LLM)
09:00-10:30 Axel Pichler (Univ. Stuttgart): Large Language Models
with Georg Vogeler
This concluding session will discuss the future directions of language models, particularly large language models (LLMs), emphasizing their evolving capabilities, ethical considerations, and potential impacts on various industries. Participants will explore cutting-edge developments, such as generative adversarial networks and reinforcement learning from human feedback, and discuss how these innovations could shape the next generation of AI applications.
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-12:30 Mid-Morning Session
12:30- Lunch Break: Excursion Buschenschank: A Buschenschank is a type of seasonal wine tavern in Austria, usually run by winemakers. They are known for serving their own wine and simple, locally sourced food, often in a rustic setting.
Thanks to the support of the university network HFDT we can offer 10 selected applicants financial support for accommodation in Graz.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
ktamas (June 19, 2024). Summer School “Computational Language Technologies for Medievalists”. DiDip. Retrieved September 15, 2024 from https://didip.hypotheses.org/2633
