Detecting Hope and Peace in Social Media

Seminar talk titled “Detecting Hope and Peace in Social Media”

Title Of the Talk: Detecting Hope and Peace in Social Media
Speaker: Shriphani Palakodety
Date &Time: Tuesday, 18th Feb 2020 14:30
Venue: Room No C-LH3

Abstract:

Text analyses in the Indian subcontinent present unique challenges. Content is authored in a variety of low-resource languages and exhibits high levels of code-switching. In this talk, we will discuss recent case studies that introduce elegant, low-supervision methods to address the linguistic diversity in user-authored Indian web content. Our case studies include the Rohingya refugee crisis, and the 2019 India/Pakistan conflict. We explore two new tasks - help speech detection and hope speech detection to surface de-escalating, positive content and explore active learning pipelines to address class imbalance. The associated papers were selected for oral presentations at AAAI 2020, and ECAI 2020.

Speaker Profile:

Shriphani Palakodety, a researcher-cum-engineer at Onai (California, USA), has developed low-resource NLP methods for a variety of computational social science problems based in the Indian subcontinent, designed some of the first neural information retrieval techniques, and developed techniques at the intersection of Zero-Knowledge proofs and formal methods. His work in these areas has been featured in several leading press outlets. He earned an MS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS from Purdue University. He has designed and taught popular courses in deep learning, and blockchain at San Jose State University. In addition to research, Shriphani runs one of India’s most popular data-visualization websites. His work has been featured in leading Indian press outlets and used by several local and international geospatial analysts. On a different note, his wood sculptures have been exhibited at leading art galleries in California.

Dates:
Tuesday, 18th Feb 2020 14:30