Words and People

What do the words we use say about us and how we view the world surrounding us? And what do we – as speakers of those words – with our own defining attributes, imply about the words we utter? In this talk, I will explore the relation between words and people and show how we can develop cross-cultural word models to identify words with cultural bias "“ i.e., words that are used in significantly different ways by speakers from different cultures. Further, I will also show how we can effectively use information about the speakers of a word (i.e., their gender, culture) to build better word association models. This is joint work with Aparna Garimella and Carmen Banea.
Rada Mihalcea is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Research in Language in Computation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011) and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2009), and a general chair for the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015). She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.