Events Calendar

NL Seminar - ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric CASSIM)

Speaker: Reihane Boghrati , (USC)

Talk Title: ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric CASSIM

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Abstract: The syntax and semantics of human language can illuminate many individual psychological differences and important dimensions of social interaction. Thus, analysis of language provides important insights into the underlying psychological properties of individuals and groups. Accordingly, psychological and psycholinguistic research has begun incorporating sophisticated representations of semantic content to better understand the connection between word choice and psychological processes. While the majority of language analysis work in psychology has focused on semantics, psychological information is encoded not just in what people say, but how they say it. We introduce ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric (CASSIM), a novel method for calculating conversation-level syntax similarity. CASSIM estimates the syntax similarity between conversations by automatically generating syntactical representations of the sentences in conversations, estimating the structural differences between them, and calculating an optimized estimate of the conversation-level syntax similarity. Also, we conduct a series of analyses with CASSIM to investigate syntax accommodation in social media discourse. Further, building off of CASSIM, we propose ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric-Group Representations CASSIM GR. This extension builds generalized representations of syntactic structures of documents, thus allowing researchers to distinguish between people and groups based on syntactic differences.


Biography: Reihane is a forth year Ph.D student at USC, working with Morteza Dehghani in Computational Social Science Laboratory. She is interested in introducing new methods and computational models to psychology, and more broadly to social sciences. Her work spans the boundary between natural language processing and psychology, as does her intellectual curiosity.

Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad 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/