Computational Sociolinguistics

When: Monday, October 17, 2016
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan

Host: Dr. Thamar Solorio

Computational linguistics has come a long way, with many exciting achievements along several research directions, ranging from morphology and syntax to semantics and pragmatics. Simultaneously, there has been a tremendous growth in the amount of social media data available on web sites such as Blogger, Twitter, or Facebook, with all of these data streams being rich in explicit demographic information, such as the age, gender, industry, or location of the writer, as well as implicit personal dimensions such as personality and values. In this talk, I will describe recent research work undertaken in the Language and Information Technologies group at the University of Michigan, under the broad umbrella of computational sociolinguistics, where language processing is used to gain new insights into people’s values, behaviors, and world views. I will share the lessons learned along the way, and take a look into the future of this new exciting research area.

Bio:

Rada Mihalcea is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Research in Language in Computation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011) and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2009), and a general chair for the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015). She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2009). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.