Jacob Eisenstein
Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Title:
Social Meanings in Social Media

Abstract:
Social interaction is increasingly conducted through online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. 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.

Bio:
Jacob Eisenstein an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on machine learning approaches to understanding human language. He is especially interested in social media, discourse, non-verbal communication and unsupervised  learning.