Events for November 18, 2016
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Pablo Barberá, School of International Relations at USC
Talk Title: Less is more? How demographic sample weights can improve public opinion estimates based on Twitter data
Abstract: Twitter data is widely acknowledged to hold great promise for the study of political behavior and public opinion. However, a key limitation in previous studies is the lack of information about the sociodemographic characteristics of individual users, which raises concerns about the validity of inferences based on this source of data. This paper addresses this challenge by employing supervised machine learning methods to estimate the age, gender, race, party affiliation, propensity to vote, and income of any Twitter user in the U.S. The training dataset for these classifiers was obtained by matching a large dataset of 1 billion geolocated Twitter messages with voting registration records and estimates of home values across 15 different states, resulting in a sample of nearly 250,000 Twitter users whose sociodemographic traits are known. To illustrate the value of this approach, I offer three applications that use information about the predicted demographic composition of a random sample of 500,000 U.S. Twitter users. First, I explore how attention to politics varies across demographics groups. Then, I apply multilevel regression and postratification methods to recover valid estimate of presidential and candidate approval that can serve as early indicators of public opinion changes and thus complement traditional surveys. Finally, I demonstrate the value of Twitter data to study questions that may suffer from social desirability bias.
Biography: Pablo Barberá joined the School of International Relations at USC as an Assistant Professor in 2016, after receiving his PhD in political science from New York University and spending a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Data Science in New York University. His research interests include computational methods in the social sciences, automated text analysis, and social network analysis. He applies these methods to the study of social media and politics, comparative electoral behavior and collective action, and political representation. His work has been published in Political Analysis, PLOS ONE, Psychological Science, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Social Media + Society, and Social Science Computer Review. His current research agenda focuses on the role of social media platforms in the growth of social protests, the measurement of public opinion and political behavior using digital trace data, and how exposure to political violence and governments' counter-messages on social media affects ideological extremism and support for terrorist groups.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Incremental spoken dialogue system for reference resolution in images
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ramesh R Manuvinakurike , USC/ICT
Talk Title: Incremental spoken dialogue system for reference resolution in images
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: In this talk, I will be speaking about our ongoing effort in the development of Eve, state-of-the-art incremental reference resolution in images based spoken dialogue agent. Incrementality is central to developing a naturally conversing spoken dialogue systems. Incrementality makes the conversations more natural and efficient compared to non-incremental alternatives. The performance of the Eve was found to be comparable to human performance and she conveniently outperforms alternative non-incremental architectures. However, building such a system is not trivial. It needs high-performance architectures and dialogue components (ASR, dialogue policies, language understanding etc.). I will also speak about future plans for enhancing Eve's capability. I also take a slight deviation and explore a different word level natural language understanding model for reference resolution in images in a dialogue setting.
Biography: Ramesh Manuvinakurike is a Ph.D. student at USC Institute for Creative Technologies working with Prof. David DeVault and Prof. Kallirroi Georgila. He is interested in developing conversational systems and has developed various such systems. His work with his colleagues on agent Eve won 'Best paper' award at Sigdial 2015.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
