Our courses: Introduction to programming

The students who enter our MA programme come from very different educational backgrounds, ranging from journalism to mathematics. Many only have a very superficial knowledge of programming (if at all). The goal of the introductory course is to teach basic concepts of writing program code and simple text processing methods they will need in other courses. The language used in this course and throughout the entire MA programme is Python 3, a powerful but easy to learn tool currently most popular in linguistic computing. The course covers basic control flow (conditionals, loops, functions), data structures (lists, dictionaries), file input/output and simple functions for text processing (split, strip, lower, replace etc.). Several classes are dedicated specifically to regular expressions and its Python implementation. All topics come with examples and problem sets that involve real-life computational linguistics data. The course is a prerequisite for further courses involving programming and automated data analysis.