[CL+NLP Lunch] CL+NLP Lunch this Wed: Jacob Eisenstein on linguistic varation

[Benjamin Lambert]

Dear everyone,

This is a reminder that the Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing lunch will be held this Wednesday at noon in GHC 4405.  Jacob Eisenstein will be speaking about studying geographic linguistic variation from text, details below.  Lunch will be served, as usual :-).

Best,
Nathan & Ben

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CL+NLP Lunch
Wednesday, December 1
GHC 4405
12pm-1:30pm

Jacob Eisenstein
Postdoc, CMU Machine Learning Department


TITLE: Large-Scale Dialectology and Sociolinguistics from Social Media

ABSTRACT: Sociolinguistics and dialectology study how language varies across socially-distinct groups of speakers. While these fields feature a strong quantitative tradition, the standard methodology requires the researcher to specify the linguistic dimensions of variability in advance -- before correlating them against extra-linguistic factors. Moreover, much of this work depends on interviews for gathering data, raising problematic issues of how to elicit "truly" vernacular speech. However, the rapid growth of social media offers exciting new possibilities for the study of socially-oriented linguistic variation.

Using a new corpus of geo-tagged text from Twitter, we have developed two computational techniques for studying linguistic variation from raw text. These methods are capable of identifying both coherent linguistic communities as well as specific lexical features that distinguish social and geographical groups. Applying these methods to Twitter, we have discovered new and robust lexical-geographic relationships that were undocumented in prior work. In addition, we are able to use raw text to accurately predict metadata such as the geographic location of social media content authors.

Speaker bio:
Jacob Eisenstein is a postdoctoral fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on machine learning for discourse, non-verbal communication, and social media. Jacob completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls award for his dissertation, “Gesture in Automatic Discourse Processing.”

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlp-lunch/


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Benjamin Lambert
Ph.D. Student of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
www.cs.cmu.edu/~belamber
Mobile: 617-869-1844


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