Learn how to use your computer to infer helpful topics from a large corpus of text with MALLET, a popular natural language processing toolkit.

The workshop will cover the following:

• What ‘topic’ means in ‘topic modeling,’ what assumptions stand behind the algorithm, and what are its possibilities and limitations
• Downloading and installing MALLET
• Demystifying the command-line interface
• Making the first steps in understanding, processing, and visualizing the outputs

There are no prerequisites, but participants should bring their own laptop to the session and have a text corpus ready to work on.

You are welcome to take a look here for a brief overview of topic modeling that is both whimsical and technically sophisticated—but prepare to read it more than once!