Social Language Processing
Social Language Processing (SLP) is a research paradigm that uses
computational techniques to automatically identify social and psychological
features of people and groups based on their use of language. The course
will draw on ideas from Linguistics, Computer Science, and Social
Psychology, with the goal of showing how practical and easily deployed SLP
techniques can be used to explore diverse phenomena at a range of different
scales. Phenomena will include the language of leadership, linguistic
reflexes of status and gender, the language of deception, and the language
of academic success. We will study these both at an individual level, for
example considering the speeches of world leaders, and also at a macroscopic
scale, showing how computational analysis of language in social media can be
used to monitor social upheaval and attitudes at a national or global level,
e.g. in the context of the Arab Spring.