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Basic Text Analytics Certificate

The Basic Certificate in Text Analytics is directed at individuals in the following groups:

  • Undergraduate or Graduate students looking to enhance their resumes after graduation
  • Community members or professionals working in the areas of language processing or related fields who wish to update their knowledge of the field or enhance their marketability by pairing language processing certification with another degree.

We are offering the Text Analytics Certificate as an assessment tool to prospective employers. Individuals who hold the Certificate can employ their skills in a variety of areas:

  • in Speech Recognition and Machine Translation
  • in various applications involving text-mining, text-classification, or text-filtering such as sentiment analysis of product reviews or microblogs, customer service support analysis,  SPAM detection, and litigation support
  • in Information Retrieval and Information Extraction

The following are learning outcomes for the Basic Text Analytics Certificate:

  1. Describe a variety of text analysis steps, understand their interdependencies, and identify algorithms for each step. 
  2. Choose an appropriate algorithm and/or analytic tool for a variety of practical text analysis problems, such as classification or named-entity recognition.
  3. Define the difference between sequential and non-sequential probabilistic models and generative and discriminative models, identify examples of each, and give motivations for choosing one over the other.
  4. Perform analyses of a variety of types on actual text data by writing scripts in a programming language such as R or Python.
  5. Apply an understanding of the ways that linguistic information is structured to the analysis of natural language texts.

The Basic Certificate requires a minimum of 12 units.

Courses and areas:

  • Mathematical and Data Analysis Tools: Linguistics 571 or 572
  • Probability: Statistics 550 or 551A or equivalent (for example, Statistics 670A);  students must satisfy lower division calculus or linear algebra prerequisites  for these courses (Mathematics 151, 252, and 254)
  • Intro to Computational Linguistics: Linguistics 581
  • Statistical Methods in Text Analysis: Linguistics 583

Students must obtain a grade of C (2.0) or better in each of the certificate courses.

Transfer credit is sometimes possible for one equivalent course (or, rarely, two equivalent courses) taken elsewhere. All applications for transfer credit are evaluated individually by the Certificate Program. No academic credit for course work is granted for work experience. 

(1) Fill out the Certificate Enrollment Form and and send to [email protected]

(2) Register and pay for the certificate. You can register, and pay for, courses for the certificate in any of three ways:

  1. as an undergraduate candidate for a bachelor's degree, taking the courses as electives (Note: Courses in the certificate may count toward the major in linguistics or the major in statistics but may not count toward the minor in linguistics or the minor in text analytics).  Information regarding fees can be found at https://bfa.sdsu.edu/financial/student/tuition.

  2. as a graduate candidate for a master's degree, taking the courses as electives.  Additional information is available at https://admissions.sdsu.edu/graduate.

  3. through the SDSU Global Campus ("Open University").  Additional information is available at https://ces.sdsu.edu/open-university.

For alternatives 1-2, you must have been admitted to San Diego State University through the regular application process. For alternative 3, no application or acceptance procedure is necessary; the SDSU Global Campus is the division of the university open to the general public. (Note: the course work and all Certificate requirements are the same regardless of the way you register and pay for them, and there is no difference between Certificates earned by individuals registering through Global Campus and those earned by individuals registering as admitted students.) 

After completion of the coursework for the certificate, students should contact Darlene Bych ([email protected]) and provide an unofficial transcript showing that relevant coursework has been completed.


Contact Us

Mark Gawron, Program Advisor
Email: [email protected] | Office: SHW 238

Darlene Bych, Certificate Program Coordinator
Email: [email protected] | Phone: (619) 594-1915 | Office: SHW 215

 

Important Links

SDSU Catalog | Class Schedule