I recommend the courses from statistics.com - price reductions for educators... Do you see any possible applications for libraries?
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Peter Bruce <ourcour...@statistics.com> Date: Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 4:09 PM Subject: online courses- Sentiment Analysis, Text Mining To: char...@mail.colgate.edu Dear ... ....: How are you (your organization/product/service) regarded in cyberspace? Thrifty with money and time, people are unsparing with their opinions using Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Flixster, blogs, web forums, product reviews... Sentiment analysis is the relatively new art and science of distilling useful data from this mass of unstructured text. The first annual conference on this subject was just held in NYC (google "Sentiment Analysis Symposium"); one of the main presenters was Nitin Indurkhya and his staff from eBay. He will present two online courses at statistics.com in June and July: Jun 3 - Jul 1: Text Mining (4 weeks) Jul 8 - Jul 29: Sentiment Analysis (3 weeks) "Text Mining" will introduce the essential techniques of text mining -the extension of data mining's standard predictive methods to unstructured text. This course will discuss these standard predictive modeling techniques (some familiarity with these methods will help), and will devote considerable attention to the data preparation and handling methods that are required to transform unstructured text into a form in which it can be mined. Access to software is provided with the course text. "Sentiment Analysis" introduces you to the algorithms, techniques and software used in sentiment analysis. Their use will be illustrated by reference to existing applications, particularly product reviews and opinion mining. The course will try to make clear both the capabilities and the limitations of these applications. For real-world applications, sentiment analysis draws heavily on work in computational linguistics and text-mining. At the completion of the course, a student will have a good idea of the field of sentiment analysis, the current state-of-the-art and the issues and problems that are likely to be the focus of future systems. Nitin Indurkhya is co-author of "Text Mining" (Springer), and co-editor of the "Handbook of Natural Language Processing" (CRC). Dr. Indurkhya is Principal Research Scientist at eBay. Previously, he was a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (Australia), as well as the founder and president of Data-Miner Pty Ltd, an Australian company engaged in data-mining consulting and education. Participants can ask questions and exchange comments directly with Dr. Indurkhya via a private discussion forum throughout each course. For details and to register: http://www.statistics.com/courses/data-mining-2/textmining/ http://www.statistics.com/courses/data-mining-2/sentiment-analysis/ The courses take place online at statistics.com in a series of weekly lessons and assignments, and require about 15 hours per week. Participate at your own convenience; there are no set hours when you must be online. Peter Bruce ourcour...@statistics.com P.S. Just let me know if you no longer wish to receive our course announcements. statistics.com 612 N. Jackson St. Arlington VA 22201 USA