Language is not only about the words, it is also about the people. While much of the work in computational linguistics has focused almost exclusively on words (and their relations), recent research in the emerging field of computational sociolinguistics has shown that we can effectively leverage the close interplay between language and people. In this talk, I will explore this interaction, and show (1) that we can develop cross-cultural language models to identify words that are used in significantly different ways by speakers from different cultures; and (2) that we can effectively use information about the people behind the words to build better language representations.

Dr. Mihalcea holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Southern Methodist University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Oxford. In 2008 Mihalcea received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is an outspoken promoter of diversity in computer science. She supports expansion of the traditional analysis of educational success, which tends to focus on acdemic behavior, to include student life, personality and background outside the classroom. Mihalcea leads Girls Encoded, a program designed to develop the pipeline of women in computer science and to retain women who enter the program. Her research includes lie-detection softward and an algorithm-based system to identify cues in fake news stories.