In this paper we provide an account of how we ported a text and data mining course online in summer 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and how we improved it in a second pilot run. We describe the course, how we adapted it over the two pilot runs and what teaching techniques we used to improve students’ learning and community building online. We also provide information on the relentless feedback collected during the course which helped us to adapt our teaching from one session to the next and one pilot to the next. We discuss the lessons learned and promote the use of innovative teaching techniques applied to the digital such as digital badges and pair programming in break-out rooms for teaching Natural Language Processing courses to beginners and students with different backgrounds.

Twitter-related studies often need to geo-locate Tweets or Twitter users, identifying their real-world geographic locations. As tweet-level geotagging remains rare, most prior work exploited tweet content, timezone and network information to inform geolocation, or else relied on off-the-shelf tools to geolocate users from location information in their user profiles. However, such user location metadata is not consistently structured, causing such tools to fail regularly, especially if a string contains multiple locations, or if locations are very fine-grained. We argue that user profile location (UPL) and tweet location need to be treated as distinct types of information from which differing inferences can be drawn. Here, we apply geoparsing to UPLs, and demonstrate how task performance can be improved by adapting our Edinburgh Geoparser, which was originally developed for processing English text. We present a detailed evaluation method and results, including inter-coder agreement. We demonstrate that the optimised geoparser can effectively extract and geo-reference multiple locations at different levels of granularity with an F1-score of around 0.90. We also illustrate how geoparsed UPLs can be exploited for international information trade studies and country-level sentiment analysis.

This work investigates how automated methods can be used to classify social media text into argumentation types. In particular it is shown how supervised machine learning was used to annotate a Twitter dataset (London Riots) with argumentation classes. An investigation of issues arising from a natural inconsistency within social media data found that machine learning algorithms tend to over fit to the data because Twitter contains a lot of repetition in the form of retweets. It is also noted that when learning argumentation classes we must be aware that the classes will most likely be of very different sizes and this must be kept in mind when analysing the results. Encouraging results were found in adapting a model from one domain of Twitter data (London Riots) to another (OR2012). When adapting a model to another dataset the most useful feature was punctuation. It is probable that the nature of punctuation in Twitter language, the very specific use in links, indicates argumentation class.