May 5, 2019

Guest speaker: Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University)

The Vector Institute Machine Learning Advances and Applications Seminar series is pleased to welcome Dan Jurafsky (Stanford University), who works on language processing, computational linguistics, and language in specific contexts. His talk, "'Does this vehicle belong to you?': Computational extraction of social meaning from language", will be taking place on Thursday, May 9, from 12 PM to 2 PM, in room 1160 of the Bahen Centre.

Police body-worn cameras have the potential to play an important role in understanding and improving police-community relations. In this talk I describe a series of studies conducted by our large interdisciplinary team at Stanford that use speech and natural language processing on body-camera recordings to model the interactions between police officers and community members in traffic stops. We draw on linguistic models of dialogue structure and of interpersonal relations like respect to automatically quantify aspects of the interaction from the text and audio. I describe the differences we find in the language directed toward black versus white community members, and offer suggestions for how these findings can be used to help improve the relations between police officers and the communities they serve. I'll also cover a number of our results on using computational methods to uncover historical societal biases, and detect framing, agenda-setting and political polarization in the media. Together, these studies highlight how natural language processing can help us interpret latent social content behind the words we use.

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