[NLP for Social Science #4]: Julia Mendelsohn - Incite at Columbia University

This free public lecture series explores how NLP is used to illuminate social processes and institutions.

Julia Mendelsohn

When discussing politics, people often use subtle linguistic strategies to influence how their audience thinks about issues, which can then impact public opinion and policy. For example, anti-immigration activists may describe immigrants with dehumanizing flood metaphors, frame immigration as a threat to native-born citizens’ jobs, or even use coded expressions to covertly connect migration with antisemitic conspiracy theories. In this presentation, I will focus on the latter two strategies: framing and dog whistle communication. I will discuss how we (1) draw from multiple social science disciplines to develop typologies and curate data resources, (2) build and evaluate NLP models for detecting these strategies, (3) computationally analyze how these strategies are used in political discussions across several domains, and (4) assess the implications of such nuanced rhetoric for both people and language technology systems.

About this workshop

The goal of this new lecture series is to invite scholars whose research uses contemporary NLP methods to illuminate not only the internal structures and patterns of linguistic forms but also the social processes and institutions in which they are embedded. The work of these speakers represents some of the most promising directions in applied NLP due to its technical rigor, research design, and theoretical depth.

Support for this series is generously provided by INCITE at Columbia and the Platial Analysis Lab at McGill. This workshop is jointly organized by Jack LaViolette (Columbia University, sociology) and Mikael Brunila (McGill University, geography).

You can find the complete schedule of dates and speakers on our website.