This next CLIP event looks really fantastic!

Please join us on Wednesday at 11AM in AV Williams room 3258 for the University of Maryland Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) colloquium!

May 2: Jacob Eisenstein: Searching for social meanings in social media

Social interaction is increasingly conducted through online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, leaving a recorded trace of millions of individual interactions. While some have focused on the supposed deficiencies of social media with respect to more traditional communication channels, language in social media features the same rich connections with personal and group identity, style, and social context. However, social media’s unique set of linguistic affordances causes social meanings to be expressed in new and perhaps surprising ways. This talk will describe research that builds on large-scale social media corpora using analytic tools from statistical machine learning. I will focus on some of the ways in which social media data allow us to go beyond traditional sociolinguistic methods, but I will also discuss lessons from the sociolinguistics literature that the new generation of “big data” research might do well to heed.

This research includes collaborations with David Bamman, Brendan O’Connor, Tyler Schnoebelen, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing.

Bio: Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on social media analysis, discourse, and non-verbal communication. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.

Location of AV Williams:

http://www.umd.edu/CampusMaps/bld_detail.cfm?bld_code=AVW

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=av+williams

Webpage for CLIP events:

https://wiki.umiacs.umd.edu/clip/index.php/Events#Colloquia