MATH Seminar

Title: Searching for social meanings in social media
Seminar: Computer Science
Speaker: Jacob Eisenstein of Georgia Institute of Technology
Contact: Eugene Agichtein, eugene@mathcs.emory.edu
Date: 2012-05-04 at 3:00PM
Venue: MSC W201
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Abstract: 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 for the new generation of "big data" research. This research includes collaborations with David Bamman, Brendan O'Connor, Tyler Schnoebelen, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing.