Title: Extracting Social Meaning from the Everyday: The Computational Linguistics of Food, Dating, and the Spread ofInnovation

Speaker: Professor Dan Jurafsky
               Stanford University

Date:   25 March 2014 (Tuesday)
Time:   4:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Theatre 2 (LSK, LT2) Lee Shau Kee Building,
            The Chinese University of Hong Kong
 
Abstract:
I summarize four projects in the computational extraction of socialmeaning from language.   In two studies we explore the relationshipbetween language and social scientific variables: economicsand social psychology in the language of US restaurant menus andreviews, andsocial and affective stances like friendliness or flirtationin the phonetics, lexical, and discourse features of recordedspeed dates.In two studies we use linguistic information to investigatedifferent aspects of thespread of innovation: the role of interdisciplinarity in thespread of innovation in science,and the role that people's lifecycle in a community plays inspreading linguistic innovation.

About the speaker:
Dan Jurafsky is Professor of Linguistics, and Professor by courtesy of Computer Science, at Stanford University.  He is the co-author of the widely-used textbook "Speech and Language Processing",co-created one of the first massively open online courses,Stanford'scourse in Natural Language Processing, and is the recipient of a2002 MacArthur Fellowship.  His research focuses on computationallinguistics, including its application to the social and behavioralsciences, as well as the linguistics of food, conversation, andChinese.