Eventi del

26 2018 12:45 - 14:00
Meeting room 4-E4-SR03, Via Roentgen 1

Language Technologies for Social Sciences

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Stanford University

The vast quantities of language data that capture diverse aspects of human behavior offer tremendous opportunities for machine learning and language technologies to gain insights about society. In this talk, I show how natural language processing techniques can be expanded from understanding the meanings of words and sentences to inferring the underlying social structures and processes they reflect. In so doing, we can identify and intervene in crucial societal issues. I apply these techniques to computationally detect two ways in which the social context affects language use: 1) social relations affecting how individuals interact with one another, and 2) social constructs shaping how institutions interact with communities. First, I show how to computationally detect various manifestations of power in workplace interactions between individuals — providing means to study the effects of incivility in those settings. Second, I show how to computationally investigate the ways race shapes the interactions between the police and the communities they serve — providing means for law enforcement to address and monitor racial disparities in policing. Finally, I talk about how these methods can be expanded to language data of other genres. My research looks beyond words and phrases and introduces ways to extract the richer rhetorical and dialog aspects of interactions, and demonstrates the importance of such in-depth language processing for the computational social sciences.