15 March: DCLRS Mar 15, M Keane (UCD), Power Laws & Language, LB01
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of March 2013 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2013 | Full index
Mark Keane (UCD) speaks on
Power Laws & Language: Can We Predict Population-Level Decision Making?
The last few years have seen an explosion of research that predicts human
behaviour using language, specifically, words that are available online.
Cultural changes can be tracked from GoogleBooks, search queries can be
used to predict flu epidemics and tweets frequencies can predict
movies box-office takings. Most of this research suggests that what
people write down, is a fairly good proxy for what they think and,
subsequently, decide to do; especially, if those words are
in a very large data set.
This talk presents one further example of this research trend, based on
work done with Aaron Gerow (TCD) on predicting stock market movements
from changes in the distributional patterns of language.
Gerow & Keane (2011, IJCAI-11) show that power laws of words in
financial articles (from the New York TImes, BBC and Financial Times)
undergo systematic changes as one enters a bubble market. The
wider implications of this work for population-level language analyses
and characterising human behaviour from words are explored.
Short Biography
Since 1998, Prof. Mark Keane has been Chair of Computer Science at
University College Dublin. From 2004-2007 he was Director of ICT
(2004-2006) and Director General (2006-2007) at Science Foundation Ireland
(SFI) where he oversaw a 700M+ euro research investment. He advised the
Irish Government on its 3.7B euro Strategy for Science, Technology &
Innovation (SSTI). He was also VP of Innovation & Partnerships at UCD
(2007-2009). He has a BA (UCD) and PhD (TCD) in Cognitive Psychology and
previously worked in University of London, the Open University, Cardiff
University and Trinity College Dublin (FTCD, 1994). Prof.Keane has
published 150+ articles, has a H index of 34 reflecting almost 6000 Google
Scholar citations, including 12 publications with >100 citations. He
currently carries out research on analogy, metaphor, the semantics of
motion, surprise and big data language analyses.
www.scss.tcd.ie/disciplines/intelligent_systems/clg/clg_web/DCLRS
_______________________________________________
cogsci mailing list
cogsci@scss.tcd.ie
https://lists.scss.tcd.ie/mailman/listinfo/cogsci
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of March 2013 | Index of year: 2013 | Full index