103 - Processing Language in Social Media, with Brendan O'Connor

103 - Processing Language in Social Media, with Brendan O'Connor

Author: Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence January 27, 2020 Duration: 43:12
We talked to Brendan O’Connor for this episode about processing language in social media. Brendan started off by telling us about his projects that studied the linguistic and geographical patterns of African American English (AAE), and how obtaining data from Twitter made these projects possible. We then talked about how many tools built for standard English perform very poorly on AAE, and why collecting dialect-specific data is important. For the rest of the conversation, we discussed the issues involved in scraping data from social media, including ethical considerations and the biases that the data comes with. Brendan O’Connor is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Warning: This episode contains explicit language (one swear word).

While NLP Highlights is currently on hiatus, its archive remains a compelling snapshot of conversations from the front lines of computational linguistics. Produced by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, this science podcast carved out a space for deep, researcher-led discussions about natural language processing. Each episode functions as an informal seminar, where the people actively designing algorithms and pushing the field forward explain their work in their own words. You'll hear about the nuanced challenges behind making machines understand, generate, and reason with human language, from foundational theories to unexpected applications. The dialogue in this podcast often delves into the "why" behind the research, not just the results, offering clarity on complex topics like machine translation, sentiment analysis, or large language models. It’s a chance to listen as experts articulate their thought processes, debates, and moments of insight, with all the candidness that comes from a conversation between peers. The views shared are personal perspectives from the hosts and their guests, independent of their affiliated institutions. For anyone curious about how machines learn to parse meaning, the archived episodes of NLP Highlights provide a thoughtful and accessible entry point.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

NLP Highlights
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