Extracting social meaning from language: The computational linguistics of food, innovation, and community

Lecture by Dan Jurafsky, Fillmore Professor, at the Charles M. Harper Center, room 104, at 6pm. Reception to follow at 7:30pm at the Cloister Club, in Ida Noyes Hall.

Automatically extracting social meaning from language is one of the most exciting challenges in computational linguistics. In this talk I describe the use of computational linguistics to help extract and understand social meaning from texts of different sorts. I'll show how language can signal the crucial role that interdisciplinarity plays in the history of scientific innovation, study the way economic, social, and psychological variables are reflected in the language we use to talk about food, and show what the language of online communities can tell us about the nature of linguistic innovation across the lifespan.