Piek Vossen and his team organize a Summer School course “Perspectives on Subjectivity”, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands from July 06-17, 2015.
Who should join this course?
Advanced Bachelor/ Master students of Linguistics (theoretical, applied or computational), Artificial Intelligence and Journalism, and others interested in cultural perspectives in communication.
Course content
Welcome to Perpectives on Subjectivity: an excellent course in Amsterdam! That is a very subjective opening, as you will agree. Here the subjective perspective of the writer is obvious, but as a rule it is much more subtle. Subjectivity is one of the key elements of natural language. Every communicative act is subjective to some degree. Subjectivity starts with the intentions of the producer of the message and affects its associated functions and syntactic structures, not to mention the choice of vocabulary and associated connotations. All of this can be summarized as perspective.
This course combines theoretical linguistic notions about perspectives with hands-on work on real language data in the lab. Moving between theory, discussions, practical data annotation and data use (machine learning and quantative/ qualitative analysis), you explore a wide range of linguistic phenomena: reference, modality, attribution, registers, sentiment analysis, opinions, temporal processing and so on.
Perspectives on Subjectivity is provided by the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (CLTL), which models computer understanding of natural language with a central role for sources like lexicons, ontologies and terminology. The CLTL is part of the Department of Language and Communication in the Faculty of humanities at VU University Amsterdam.
Learning objectives