NASSLLI 2025 - Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science

Welcome to the Natural Langauge Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science (CSS) course at NASSLLI 2025!

Course Description

Our course will guide students on data annotation and exploration, data ethics, and computational modeling towards answering questions in social science and linguistics (particularly pragmatics). The course offers undergraduates and early graduate students an end-to-end overview of our research process towards answering linguistic and social science questions using modern NLP methods. The course is intended for anyone interested in pursuing Computational Social Science research, especially on linguistic data. Basic programming proficiency in Python will be helpful, but is not required.

Instructors

Venkat is an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College (beginning Fall 2024). As a Ph.D student at The University of Texas at Austin, he designed and taught a summer course Language & Computers, which introduced students to the computational study of language. At Ithaca, he has taught Principles of Computer Science, and revitalized the Programming Languages course with a focus on studying programming languages as scientific objects, and understanding how programming languages are designed and implemented. He will also be designing and teaching a new Natural Language Processing course in Spring 2024.

Laura is an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College (beginning Fall 2023). At Middlebury, she has taught a range of Computer Science (CS) courses throughout the curriculum, including Introduction to Computing, Software Development, and Natural Language Processing (a new course to the college that she designed). She designed and taught a short Natural Language Processing course for high school students at Carleton College’s Summer Liberal Arts Institute, a program in which students had varied CS and math backgrounds. At the University of Michigan, she taught courses at the introductory level.