[Sigtis-l] Call for Participation + Travel Grants - Workshop on Language Technology and Computational Social Science

[Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil]

Call for Participation:

WORKSHOP on LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY and COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
At the 2014 meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
June 26, 2014 in Baltimore, Maryland
http://www.mpi-sws.org/~cristian/LACSS_2014.html


NEW! Application for travel support, due May 14 (see below)


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Amber Boydstun (Political Science, University of California, Davis)
Ed Chi (Google)
Justin Grimmer (Political Science, Stanford University)
Lillian Lee (Computer Science, Cornell University) 
Philip Resnik (Linguistics, University of Maryland)
Sali Tagliamonte (Linguistics, University of Toronto)

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
A major growth area in applied natural language processing has been the field of computational social science, in which automated techniques are applied to massive datasets to answer scientific questions about society.  Although much work in computational social science focuses on structured data or network data, linguistic data is also central.  While some existing natural language processing techniques have found use in this growing community, new techniques for discovering and analyzing social meanings and structures in text are in high demand.  

Tackling these challenges should be an interdisciplinary pursuit, building on expertise not just in language technologies but also in substantive social science fields (e.g., political science, economics, sociology, etc.). In particular, engagement between NLP researchers and social scientists will introduce new problem formulations and new theoretical frameworks that will broaden and deepen applications of language technology to social science.

The goal of this workshop is to increase the visibility of this application area for ACL researchers and to help build connections between language technologists and social scientists. The workshop is organized around invited talks from researchers who have successfully brought language technologies to computational social science research questions. Following each invited talk session, there will be an open discussion period.

TRAVEL GRANTS
Thanks to generous grants from the National Science Foundation and from Google, we can offer limited support for registration, travel, and accommodations. Priority will be given to non-CS participants, to members of underrepresented groups, and to graduate students. A short application for support can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mLMlnMmt_QUbGD4piRxTdpEnk8JpcZTniIr1_P9iIew/viewform

Applications will be accepted until May 14, 2014.

Early registration prices for ACL are available until May 17. Note that we will reimburse no more than the early registration rates, so please register promptly.
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/ACL2014/Registration.htm