[CL+NLP Lunch] Reminder: Today at 12:30pm: CL+NLP Lunch, Walid Magdy, *GHC 8102*

[Dallas Card]

Reminder: Today at 12:30pm!

Please join us this Friday for a talk by Walid Magdy from the Qatar
Computing Research Institute. Lunch will be provided!


CL+NLP lunch <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlp-lunch/>
Friday, July 18 at 12:30pm
GHC 8102

Walid Magdy, Qatar Computing Research Institute

*Social Media as a Source of Unbiased News*

Abstract:
News media are usually biased toward some political views. Also, the
coverage of news is limited to news reported by news agencies. Social
media is currently a hub for users to report and discuss news. This
includes news reported or missed by news media. Developing a system that
can generate news reports from social media can give a global unbiased
view on what is hot in a given region. In this talk, the challenges for
tracking topics related to news are discussed. An automatically adapting
information filtering approach is presented that allows tracking broad and
dynamic topics in social media. TweetMogaz, a news portal platform that
generated news from Twitter, is demoed. TweetMogaz reports in real-time
what is happening in hot regions in the middle east, such as Syria and
Egypt, in the form of comprehensive reports that include top tweets,
images, videos, and news article shared by users on Twitter.

Bio:
Walid Magdy is a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute
(QCRI) in Doha, Qatar. Walid's main fields of expertise are information
retrieval and natural language processing. He received his PhD in 2012
from the School of Computing in Dublin City University (DCU), Dublin,
Ireland. Earlier, he received his BSc. and Msc. from the Faculty of
Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt in 2005 and 2008 respectively. He
worked before as research engineer in Microsoft and IBM. Walid has a list
of publications in top tier conferences and journals, such as SIGIR, CIKM,
EMNLP, ICWSM, ECIR, IRJ, and TOIS. He also has a set of filed and issued
patents during his work in IBM, Microsoft, DCU, and QCRI.