[Lign274] [Fwd: Monday 12pm: "User classification for informal on-line political discourse"]

[Roger Levy]

Despite the time overlap with our class today, I want to encourage 
interested people to make it over to this talk!  You can always come to 
class late today, I will forgive you...;)

Roger

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Monday 12pm: "User classification for informal on-line 
political discourse"
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 21:29:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: Charles Elkan <elkan at cs.ucsd.edu>
To: ai at cs.ucsd.edu, talks-cse at cs.ucsd.edu



UCSD AI Seminar

Monday May 21, 12pm, CSE 4140

Speaker: Rob Malouf

Title: User classification for informal on-line political discourse

Abstract: Weblogs, message boards, chat rooms logs, and other informal web
texts are an incredibly rich knowledge base.  However, the nature of these
texts often makes them unsuitable for analysis using many standard natural
language processing methods.  This talk will describe on-going work in
classification of participants in informal on-line political discourse.
Lexically-oriented methods, such as sentiment analysis and text
classification, have worked well in other domains but perform poorly on
this task.  We have achieved better results by augmenting these methods
with social network analysis, exploiting information about the structure
of the on-line community and the ways that users interact with each other.
The same interactive quality of the texts which creates challenges for
more traditional NLP techniques also creates opportunities for new types
of analysis.

Speaker bio: Rob Malouf is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and a
faculty member in the Computational Linguistics MA Program at San Diego
State University.  His Ph.D. is from Stanford.

http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/elkan/259/

-- 

Roger Levy                      Email: rlevy at ucsd.edu
Assistant Professor             Phone: 858-534-7219
Department of Linguistics       Fax:   858-534-4789
UC San Diego                    Web:   http://ling.ucsd.edu/~rlevy