Computer processing of texts in quantitative linguistics course

Abstract

In the article one of the approaches to teaching quantitative linguistics course is described. In spite of the fact that the course is relatively new there are already some traditions in its teaching. Usually the usage of a number of mathematical methods and methods of mathematical statistics is accented. Students studying quantitative linguistics according to these programs are required to have a deep understanding in the corresponding subject areas. From the beginning of the 2000s text processing computer programs have been actively developed, there are examples of using these programs in studying process. Supporting and updating previously created programs is not of current interest, online services developed by big corporations are widely used for analysis and processing of linguistic information. Programs that appeared lately have much better quality, reliability and availability compared to their predecessors. They can be successfully used in studying process. The goal of writing this article is to describe the possibilities of modern computer means for text information analysis and the methods of their usage in the process of teaching students the course of quantitative linguistics. The functionalities of a number of popular online text processing and analysis services are described in this article. Further in the article examples of the practical work on following topics are given: Text frequency characteristics, Zipf’s Law, Semantic text analysis, Typological indices of Greenberg, Grammar text analysis, building semantic graphs. Computer text processing is used also during phonosemantic analysis of words and text, identification of the author of a text, finding the amount of information in the linguistic unit. In the program of teaching students on specialization «Applied linguistics» for studying the discipline «Quantitative linguistics» 3 credits, 10 hours of lectures and 20 hours of workshops are allocated. In prospect, the development of quantitative linguistics teaching course, extension of a list of topics for studying methods of computer text processing, deepening knowledge by studying algorithms of automated text processing are possible. This can be a subject for further research in the field of teaching quantitative linguistics course.