COURSE

UGOD5160

Applied Natural Language Processing for Social Inquiry

Society Hub / Urban Governance and Design · 3 Credits

This course provides an applied introduction to natural language processing (NLP) techniques for social inquiry, equipping students with the skills to analyze large-scale English and Chinese textual data. Through hands-on labs and real-world case studies, students learn core methods including text preprocessing, dictionary approaches, topic models, embeddings, and supervised classification. Emphasis is placed on methodological applications, interpretation, and the practical use of NLP tools to investigate social, political, cultural, and urban phenomena. Students will also gain exposure to the emerging uses and challenges of large language models (LLMs) in social research, as well as introductory perspectives on applying computational approaches to visual data.