Type of session : Teach/Play

Title: Introduction to GATE for text analysis

Name of session facilitator: Diana Maynard

Approximate duration: 2 hours

Skill level: all

Proposal: 

This session will demonstrate the basics of text analysis tasks such as named entity recognition and sentiment analysis with the open source GATE tools. Participants will be able to use the toolkit to try simple tasks as we go along, such as using some of the existing applications and tools for different languages, and try annotating their own texts. There are dozens of different tools and plugins to try out. Adventurous users can even try building their own simple applications, tinkering with existing ones, or comparing different tools for the same task and evaluating and visualising the results. Demonstration and discussion of the successes and failures will be encouraged!

Prerequisite: no experience of anything required. Bring laptop with GATE installed (gate.ac.uk/download)

Materials for download: slides and hands-on material (corpora etc) gate.ac.uk/tutorials/THATcamp2018.html

Type of session : TEACH

Title : Introduction to data mining and visualisation with Voyant Tools

Name of session facilitator(s) : Geraldine

Approximate duration : 1h

Skill level : beginner

Proposal :

Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based application for performing text analysis. It can be used to analyze online texts or ones uploaded by users. It offers features such as word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, word clouds… Its interface is composed of panels which perform these varied analytical tasks. Here is a list of the tools available :

voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/tools

The workshop could comprise a brief presentation of the software’s capabilities followed by an exercise to manipulate its mains functions.

Prerequisite : Laptop with internet access and sample file downloaded

Type of session : TEACH

Title : Workshop : Introduction to Open Refine for data wrangling.

Name of session facilitator(s) : Geraldine / Nora ?

Approximate duration : 1h

Skill level : beginner (no coding)

Proposal :

Open refine is a free and open source tool to clean and explore datasets in tabular forms.

An open refine project consists of a table with rows of data.

OR makes it possible to identify elements in a massive file and to modify them if need be. Useful to correct mistakes, spot empty cells, merge data…

There is in particular a ‘clustering’ function which is precious to normalize data automatically.

The user can also use OR to filter the rows to display using facets that define filtering criteria. Facets can be textual, numeric….

For example, if you have a file with customer information, you can filter the rows of clients living in Brighton, whose company has over 50 employees and whose boss is female. Or those whose turnover is over a certain amount and haven’t ordered anything in the last two years. If you’re doing research on a file with information on works by various authors, you can filter only the ones whose title contains the word ‘love’, published between 1858 and 1954 in Germany.

The workshop could consist in a brief presentation of the software’s capabilities followed by an exercise to manipulate its mains functions.

Prerequisite : A laptop with OR installed and the sample file dowloaded.