LING848, FALL 2015.

Advanced Seminar in Computational Linguistics: Computational Social Science

Instructor

Where/When

Where to get information

• Schedule of topics
• Class info/discussions on Piazza

Meetings

Description

In their 2009 Science article, “Computational Social Science”, David Lazer and colleagues wrote that our online activity “leaves digital traces that can be compiled into comprehensive pictures of both individual and group behavior, with the potential to transform our understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies.” Many of those digital traces involve language behavior (social media being the most obvious example), which creates some incredibly interesting opportunities for computational linguists.

Now, "social science" is an unmanageably huge topic. The Wikipedia page on Social Science includes disciplines ranging from archaeology to social work. In this seminar, we'll narrow the field by focusing specifically on the idea of linguistic signal for underlying mental state, organizing the content largely around two main areas of study.

• The first of these is computational political science, a research topic that is trending strongly right now and which is only going to get more interesting as the 2016 elections approach. There the idea of mental state emerges strongly in discussions of ideology and framing. Some example questions of interest... How can we identify the ideological positions of individuals from the language they use? How is language used to emphasize or deemphasize aspects of an issue under discussion in order to persuade or influence others? How do we computationally characterize and model influence in political discourse?

• The second is computational approaches to clinical psychology. Psychological properties of individuals (e.g. gender, neuroticism) and clinical conditions (depression, autism spectrum) are closely connected with the way that individuals perceive the world and how they respond to it. Some example questions of interest... How can we identify psychological properties or conditions of individuals from the language they use? How can we track progress (or decline) of clinical conditions over time in a minimally invasive or intrusive way?

This seminar will mainly involve readings and in-class discussion, helped along by participation in discussions on Piazza. The class will be graded as follows:

• Reaction/discussion essays (20%).

  Each week you'll need to do the readings and do a brief writeup that summarizes and reacts to those readings, due the Monday night before class by posting it to the class discussion board.

• Participation (30%). This includes:
  • Participating on the class discussion board. The Monday due date for reaction writeups is designed so that people can get some discussion going online ahead of class, so that in class we're already ramped up.
  • Presentations/discussions in class. Everyone will do this a couple of times during the semester (and I'd like that to be true even for people who are not there for a grade).
  • Participating actively in class discussions.

• Term project (50%).

  I hope to encourage hands-on projects that involve real problems, aiming for papers suitable for submission to appropriate conferences. There also may be an interesting opportunity to get project work started early in the semester rather than waiting until the end.

Philip Resnik, Professor
Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies


Department of Linguistics
1401 Marie Mount Hall            UMIACS phone: (301) 405-6760       
University of Maryland           Linguistics phone: (301) 405-8903
College Park, MD 20742 USA	   Fax: (301) 314-2644 / (301) 405-7104
http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik	   E-mail: resnik AT umd _DOT.GOES.HERE_ edu