
Adriana Picoral
I’m an assistant professor of data science in the School of Information, and an affiliated faculty member in the interdisciplinary graduate program of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. I’m also the founder of the Tucson chapter of R-Ladies.
My research interests include corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and applied linguistics.
I'm a Crow Co-PI.

Course Materials
- ESOC 214 Introduction to Data Science
- ESOC 214 Spring 2021
- This course provides an introduction to the various skills and considerations required for data management and analysis in business, education, and science. Particular attention will be given to learning how to use the free and open-source computing environment R.
- Previous Instances:
Blog Posts
- November 18, 2020
- Quantitative Language Data Analysis in R: Regression and Contrasts
- The first quantitative examinations of linguistic variation, and its constraints, date back to over 50 years ago in the field of variationist sociolinguistics. Most recently, scholars have made the shift to more modern statistical software environments, such as R, which requires a broader understanding of statistics and software programming since these new environments are not single-purpose software such as VARBRUL and GoldVarb. This blog posts demonstrates how linear and logistic regression can be run in R, and how to output results for logistic regression.
Workshops
- Hispanic & Lusophone Linguistics Working Group
- Creating and formatting CVs on Overleaf (LaTeX)
- In this workshop we select a CV LaTeX template and modify it on Overleaf. A brief overview of what LaTeX is and its syntax will be provided.
- Crow Workshop Series
- Corpus Data Scraping and Sentiment Analysis
- In this workshop, we scrape Amazon for reviews using the rvest R package to build a corpus of product reviews. We then do some sentiment analysis from a critical perspective.
- Corpus Searches in R
- In this workshop, we work with a tagged corpus. We go over the steps of reading in a corpus (organized as multiple text files) in R, doing searches in the corpus using regular expressions, and producing concordance lines.
- NAU Corpus Club + CALISTO
- Building a corpus of tweets with R
- This workshop material was prepared for a workshop on corpus linguistics and Twitter mining for the NAU Corpus Club and COLISTO.
- R-Ladies
- Building Interactive Interfaces for Textual Data Exploration
- In this workshop, we work with the Shiny R package (Chang et al., 2020) to build a web-based interface (a.k.a. dashboard) with interactive filtering options and a regular expression search field to dynamically explore textual data. This was an invited workshop at the R-Ladies Athens meetup.
- Twitter Data Mining in R
- R-Ladies Tucson Workshop held on September 26, 2020. In this 2-hour workshop, we go over the steps to search tweets using the Twitter API, annotated them with Spacy, and doing some basic collocation analysis.
- Organizando um projeto de análise de dados com RStudio
- Esse material foi desenvolvido para o primeiro meetup (online) da R-Ladies de Ribeirão Preto (@RLadiesRP).
- ResBaz Arizona Workshop
- ResBaz Arizona 2020 Intro to R
- This is a two part intro to R workshop. Part I introduces the basics of coding in R, including how to manipulate objects, use functions, and write if statements, for loops, and simple functions. Part II is based on the tidyverse package, and it covers how to load, inspect, and explore data in R. While learners at different expertise levels are welcome to attend, these workshops were designed for participants with no or little programming experience.
- LAEL PUC-SP Workshop
- LAEL Machine Learning Workshop
- This workshop was part of the LAEL Research Bazaar, a celebration of the golden jubilee of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics and Language Studies (LAEL), at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUCSP), Brazil.
Publications
- Picoral, A., Staples, S., & Reppen, R. (in press). Evaluation of annotation resources for learner data: A comparison of software tools. Special Issue of International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, Natural Language Processing for Learner Corpus Research.
- Picoral, A. (in press). Pens bleed, ink flows: Corpus-informed genre-based writing. In V. Viana (Ed.) New Ways in Teaching with Corpora. TESOL Press, Annapolis Junction, MD.
- Staples, R., Picoral, A., Novikov, A., & Sommer-Farias, B. (in press). Expanding research methods: Using existing corpora in the study of writing. In R. Manchón & C. Polio (Eds.) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Writing. Routledge Handbooks in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching.
- Picoral, A., Carvalho, A. (2020). The Acquisition of Preposition + Article Contractions in L3 Portuguese among Different L1-Speaking Learners: A Variationist Approach. Languages, 5 (4), 45-62.
- Picoral, A. (2020). L3 Portuguese by Spanish-English Bilinguals: Copula Construction Use and Acquisition in Corpus Data. Doctoral Thesis, University of Arizona.
- Sommer-Farias, B., Carvalho, A., & Picoral, A. (2020). Portuguese Language Program Evaluation: Implementation, Results and Follow-up Strategies. Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, 28, 1-50.