David Beaver, Department of Linguistics, at the University of Texas at Austin, Usa

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.