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Desmond Upton Patton, “Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing”

Thursday, February 20, 2020 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Associate Professor Desmond Upton Patton
Associate Professor Desmond Upton Patton
Desmond Upton Patton, Associate Professor of Social Work, Columbia University

While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. Columbia University’s Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication. CASM utilizes a team-based approach to analysis of social media data, explicitly informed by community expertise. The team uses CASM to analyze Twitter posts from gang-involved youth in Chicago. They designed a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of a support vector machine using CASM hand-labeled posts against a distant model. They found that the CASM-informed hand-labeled data outperforms the baseline distant labels, indicating that the CASM labels capture additional dimensions of information that content-only methods lack. They then question whether this is helpful or harmful for gun violence prevention.

Details

Date:
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Time:
5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Event Category:
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Venue

MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area)
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA 02139 United States
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