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Dan Jurafsky, 4:00pm Tuesday October 24th

Jurafsky

Dan Jurafsky

 Stanford University

    Tuesday, October 24th
    Swift 107
    4:00pm (Reception to follow)

Automatically Extracting Social Meaning from Language

Professor Jurafsky will describe three lines of research from his lab on computationally extracting social meaning from language, meaning that takes into account social relationships between people.  They study interactions between police and community members in traffic stops recorded in body-worn camera footage, using language to measure interaction quality, study the role of race, and draw suggestions for going forward in this fraught area.

They computationally model the language of scientific papers and the networks of scientists to better understand the role of interdisciplinarity in scientific innovation and the implications for the history of artificial intelligence.  And they show how understanding of framing and socio-economic variables can be extracted from the language of food:  menus, reviews, and advertising. Together, these studies highlight the importance of social context for interpreting the latent meanings behind the words we use.