Language Understanding in Social Context: Theory and Practice

Abstract: Recently, natural language processing (NLP) has had increasing success and produced extensive industrial applications. Despite being sufficient to enable these applications, current NLP systems often ignore the social part of language, e.g., who says it, in what context, for what goals. In this talk, we take a closer look at social factors in language via a new theory taxonomy, and its interplay with computational methods via three lines of work. The first one studies what makes language persuasive by …

context language social theory understanding