SI 710: Computational Sociolinguistics

Fall 2019 Syllabus

Instructor: David Jurgens

Whether they know what sociolinguistics is or not, everyone is interested in sociolinguistics. Comments such as “People from that state talk funny,” or “their emails always sound so polite,” are the kind of casual remarks that come up in day-to-day conversation or end up in BuzzFeed quizzes of “what state are you from,” but behind each of them is an implicit theory about the way language and society are connected---that a way of talking is connected with a geographical location or that a certain way of writing is more polite than others.  The field of sociolinguistics, broadly characterized, investigates the relationship between linguistic phenomena and human social organization and social life.  Much of the theory in this area has come through observational research.  However, the availability of both computational tools coupled will large amounts of natural dialog has led to the new subfield of Computational Sociolinguistics which aims to develop or use computational methods to study, verify, extend, and challenge our theories of how language and society relate.  This seminar introduces the field of computational sociolinguistics which aims to study the interaction between language and identity at scale using computational techniques.  

Learning Objectives

1. Become familiar with central constructs, concepts, and key findings in the field of

sociolinguistics.

2. Develop the ability to comprehend empirical studies in sociolinguistics.
3. Construct computational models that operationalize these theories using textual data.
4. Develop critical thinking abilities and awareness of the role that language plays in mediating social relations and fostering social change.
5. Demonstrate understanding of sociolinguistics theories through presenting them to peers and through written descriptions of analysis.
6. Develop a clear research question that applies to your understanding of sociolinguistics to a specific situation.
7. Write a technical research paper where you analyze data that helps you answer a sociolinguistic research question

Materials

Weekly Readings

Weekly course readings will be posted to Canvas.  You are expected to read most of them prior to class and to deeply focus on at least two (though more is always encouraged).  

Background Sociolinguistics Readings

Background readings on Sociolinguistics will be put on reserve at the library or are available online through the UM Library:

• The guidebook to sociolinguistics, Bell 2014
• An introduction to sociolinguistics, Holmes 2013
• Introducing sociolinguistics, Meyerhoff, 2011
• Linguistic variation and change,  Scott F Kiesling, 2011.
• Sociolinguistics method and interpretation. Lesley Milroy and Matthew Gordon (2003)

Programming

Students are assumed to have basic-to-intermediate programming proficiency for this course and minimal programming instruction will be provided.  However, students are expected to come from different fields (Linguistics, Psychology, Information, CS, …), so different levels of skill are totally fine.  As one helpful pointer, here’s a good tutorial for thinking about the kind of basic programming you might need to do: https://github.com/dirkhovy/python_for_linguists.  Students can use any language they prefer (e.g., R is fine).

You don’t need to do fancy machine learning to succeed in this course.  Many fantastic computational sociolinguistic papers use very simple techniques.  As a rough heuristic, you would be expected to do something like the following:

• Write a program to extract the frequencies of words in different texts
• Load the extracted data into a data frame (e.g., using pandas)
• Run a logistic regression

If you can do that, you’re in good shape.

Course Tasks

Class Presentation

Three times per semester, you will be responsible for leading discussion with 1-3 of your peers in the class.  Typically, this discussion leading will involve several aspects:

• Read all of the papers for that week.  By reading all of the papers, you should be better able to identify the cross-cutting themes and what you think are the core hypotheses, experiments, or intellectual lineage in that weeks’ topic.  You should ideally discuss all of the readings with your group.
• As a group, put together a list of 3-5 guided reading questions for your peers and send them to me (the instructor) by Friday at 5pm.  I will then review and (if necessary) supplement the questions before posting them.  
• During the lecture, prepare a 15-20 minute overview of that week’s readings.   The overview should roughly follow this order:

• Present the basic themes of the readings using the w-questions, e.g., what was done, which kind of data did they use, who did the research and who was examined, when was this research done, and where were the subjects.  You need not go into every detail; this overview is just to serve as a reminder for what papers were assigned and a quick summary for those who chose to read a subset of the papers.
• Identify the commonalities between the papers.  What are the key themes?  How did their methods/data/hypotheses differ?   Here, try to identify commonalities and differences in how they approached the question and why they did the study
• Introduce the assumptions of the papers.  Are the assumptions justified and what is implied by these assumptions?
• Finally, explore the validity of the papers’ argument and its effects on the field.  What are the ramifications of the material?  For these, you can definitely deep dive into a few papers at the expense of others.  (Remember this is just a 15-20 minute overview!)

• After the overview, lead the class through your guided research questions for a discussion.
• Finally--this is the important part--propose two or three (or more!) computational sociolinguistic studies based on that week’s readings for the class to discuss.  You shouldn’t actually do these studies, but they should be outlined enough that someone could probably follow your instructions.  They key goal here is to see how to test/apply/extend/challenge work in Sociolinguistics computationally.  Each study should include details on

• What data do you want to use?  The data should actually be obtainable (Twitter: yes; private Facebook messages: no).  Be clear about what kind of metadata you’d want to include.
• What research hypotheses you want to test?  Be clear about how your work relates to theory and prior work.
• What methods will you use?  It can help to explain how the data gets used by the method and how the outcome of the method relates to theory.
• How will you test or evaluate your experiment?  Metrics are preferred here.  If you’re just doing an observational study, describe how you will compare your results.
• What are the ethical considerations in performing your study?  Could anyone or any social group be harmed or be profited from as a result of your work?

The overarching goal of the last piece is to brainstorm what a good computational sociolinguistics study looks like.  The class will actively come up with feedback, ideas, suggestions, or even new studies for that week’s topic.  

Pedagogical Goals: Your role as seminar leader has three specific goals:

1. You should become a local expert in that week’s topic, providing more depth in one area ideally of your interest.
2. You should learn how to teach a research topic (as an expert) in a classroom setting.
3. You should learn how to design a research experiment in computational sociolinguistics.

Research Paper

The second and largest part of the grade is a research paper on a topic of your choosing.  Research work should be performed independently, though the class and I will provide substantial feedback.  The goal of the seminar is to have a nearly-finished (or finished) working paper ready for submission to the relevant venue of your choice.^[1]  Papers will be written in LaTeX using the target venue’s formatting guidelines.

Pedagogical Goals: Your research paper has two specific goals:

1. helping you learn how to design and carry out an independent research project in the area of computational sociolinguistics.
2. presenting your research to an audience in the subject area

Peer Review

As a part of preparing your own research paper, you will peer review two parts of your peers’ research studies.  First, as a part of the paper writing process, you will produce a research proposal.  Then, three of your peers will provide feedback, much like conference and journal abstract reviewing to help you by highlighting the important and exciting aspects of your proposed work, identifying any potential pitfalls or weaknesses, and suggesting potential improvements or relevant related work.  Second, during the end of the semester, you will prepare a near-final draft of your results that your peers will review, much like a full paper review.

Pedagogical Goal:  This reviewing process will help you learn how to provide critical and helpful feedback and prepare you for the wonderful world of conference/journal reviewing.

Reading Reflections

Each week, you will receive guided reading questions for the assigned readings from the instructor and your peers. These questions are designed to help you read carefully and think critically about the content of these texts.  Twice per semester on weeks for which you aren’t leading the discussion you should respond to these questions (and/or general response questions provided in a separate form) and document these in a short 1-2 page write-up (template is provided).  

Pedagogical Goal: These reading responses are intended to help provide you with increased topical awareness and depth in two particular areas.

Grading:

30% - Presentations

10% - Peer review

10% - Reading reflections

50% - Final project

Weekly Syllabus

The Computational Sociolinguistics course is divided into a large number of different units.  Classes are expected to cover multiple units which build upon each other in complexity and technique.  

Week 1, Sept 3: Introduction 

The key question for Week 1 is what exactly is this class about?

Readings:

• Nguyen, D., Doğruöz, A. S., Rosé, C. P., & de Jong, F. (2016). Computational sociolinguistics: A survey. Computational linguistics, 42(3), 537-593.
• Androutsopoulos, Jannis. "Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer‐mediated communication." Journal of sociolinguistics 10.4 (2006): 419-438.
• Labov, William. "The social motivation of a sound change." Word 19.3 (1963): 273-309.
• Kiesling, Scott F. "Dude." American speech 79.3 (2004): 281-305.

Week 2, Sept 10: Variation

The key question for Week 2 is what does it mean for people to construct social meaning in the way they speak or write?

Readings:

• Wolfram, Walt. "The linguistic variable: Fact and fantasy." American Speech 66.1 (1991): 22-32.
• Lavandera, Beatriz R. "Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop?." Language in society 7.2 (1978): 171-182.
• Eckert, Penelope. "Variation, convention, and social meaning." Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Oakland CA. Vol. 7. 2005.
• Labov, William. "Where Does the Linguistic Variable Stop? A Response to Beatriz Lavandera. Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, No. 44." (1978).
• Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. "Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach." Discourse studies 7.4-5 (2005): 585-614.
• Eckert, Penelope. "Variation and the indexical field" Journal of sociolinguistics 12.4 (2008): 453-476.

Week 3, Sept 17: Data

The key question for Week 3 is what data can we look at to measure variation and how should we think about measuring it?

Readings:

• Vaughn, Charlotte, Tyler Kendall, and Kaylynn Gunter. "Probing the Social Meaning of English Adjective Intensifiers as a Class Lab Project." American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 93.2 (2018): 298-311.
• Labov, William. "Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation." (1981).
• Hovy, Dirk, Anders Johannsen, and Anders Søgaard. "User review sites as a resource for large-scale sociolinguistic studies." Proceedings of the 24th international conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2015.
• Sebba, Mark. "Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research." Writing systems research 1.1 (2009): 35-49.
• Eisenstein, Jacob, Brendan O'Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. "Diffusion of lexical change in social media." PloS one 9, no. 11 (2014): e113114.
• (optional) Kemp, Renee, et al. "Where Have All the Participles Went? Using Twitter Data to Teach About Language." American speech 91.2 (2016): 226-235.
• (optional) Labov, William. "Some principles of linguistic methodology." Language in society 1.1 (1972): 97-120.

Week 4, Sept 24: Regional Dialects

Readings:

• Grieve, Jack, Andrea Nini, and Diansheng Guo. "Mapping lexical innovation on American social media." Journal of English Linguistics 46.4 (2018): 293-319.
• Huang, Yuan, Diansheng Guo, Alice Kasakoff, and Jack Grieve. "Understanding US regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis." Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 59 (2016): 244-255.
• Boberg, Charles. "Newspaper Dialectology: Harnessing the Power of the Mass Media to Study Canadian English." American speech 91.2 (2016): 109-138.
• Hovy, Dirk, and Christoph Purschke. "Capturing regional variation with distributed place representations and geographic retrofitting." Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2018.
• Nguyen, Dong. “Dialect Variation on Social Media” Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (Studies in Natural Language Processing), edited by Marcos Zampieri and Preslav Nakov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Eisenstein, Jacob. "Identifying Regional Dialects in On-Line Social Media." The handbook of dialectology (2018): 368-383.
• Bamman, David, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith. "Distributed representations of geographically situated language." In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pp. 828-834. 2014.
• (optional) Kroch, Anthony S. "Toward a theory of social dialect variation." Language in society 7.1 (1978): 17-36.
• (optional) Pavalanathan, Umashanthi, and Jacob Eisenstein. "Confounds and consequences in geotagged Twitter data." Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2015.
• (optional)  Purschke, Christoph, and Dirk Hovy. "Lörres, Möppes, and the Swiss. (Re)Discovering Regional Patterns in Anonymous Social Media Data." Journal of Linguistic Geography. In Preparation.
• (optional) Hovy, Dirk, Afshin Rahimi, Timothy Baldwin, and Julian Brooke. "Visualizing Regional Language Variation Across Europe on Twitter". In: Brunn S., and Roland Kehrein (eds) Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-73400-2_175-1

Week 5, Oct 1: Gender

Readings:

• Bucholtz, Mary. "“Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls." Language in society 28.2 (1999): 203-223.
• Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein, and Tyler Schnoebelen. "Gender identity and lexical variation in social media." Journal of Sociolinguistics 18.2 (2014): 135-160.
• Herring, Susan C., and John C. Paolillo. "Gender and genre variation in weblogs." Journal of Sociolinguistics 10.4 (2006): 439-459.
• Queen, Robin. "10 Language and Sexual Identities." The handbook of language, gender, and sexuality (2014): 203.
• Trudgill, Peter. "Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich." Language in society 1.2 (1972): 179-195.
• (optional) LaScotte, Darren K. "Singular they: An empirical study of generic pronoun use." American speech 91.1 (2016): 62-80.

Week 6, Oct 8: Age

Readings:

• Coupland, N., Coupland, J., Giles, H., & Henwood, K. (1988). Accommodating the elderly: Invoking and extending a theory. Language in society, 17(1), 1-41.
• Tagliamonte, Sali A., and Derek Denis. "Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language." American speech 83.1 (2008): 3-34.`
• Nguyen, Dong, Rilana Gravel, Dolf Trieschnigg, and Theo Meder. "" How old do you think I am?" A study of language and age in Twitter." In Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. 2013.
• Rickford, John, and Mackenzie Price. "Girlz II women: Age‐grading, language change and stylistic variation." Journal of Sociolinguistics 17.2 (2013): 143-179.
• Eckert, P. (2017). Age as a sociolinguistic variable. The handbook of sociolinguistics, 151-167.
• (optional) Tagliamonte, Sali A. "So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet." Language in Society 45.1 (2016): 1-32.
• (optional) Cheshire, Jenny. "Age and generation-specific use of language." Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society 1 (1987): 761-780.

Week 7, Oct 15: Fall Break

Week 8, Oct 22: Racial Identity and Language

Readings:

• Lanehart, Sonja, and Ayesha M. Malik. "Language Use in African American Communities." The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (2015): 1.
• Blodgett, Su Lin, Lisa Green, and Brendan O'Connor. "Demographic dialectal variation in social media: A case study of African-American English."  Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2016.
• McLarty, Jason, Taylor Jones, and Christopher Hall. "Corpus-Based Sociophonetic Approaches to Postvocalic R-lessness in African American Language." American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 94.1 (2019): 91-109.
• Jones, Taylor. "Toward a description of African American Vernacular English dialect regions using “Black Twitter”." American Speech 90.4 (2015): 403-440.
• Jones, Taylor, et al. "Testifying while black: An experimental study of court reporter accuracy in transcription of African American English." Language 95.2 (2019): e216-e252.
• Hill, Jane H. The everyday language of white racism. (Ch. 2) John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
• (optional) Labov, William. "Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in Ann Arbor." Language in society 11.2 (1982): 165-201.

Things Due:

Research Project Proposal

Week 9, Oct 29: Audience Design and Style

Readings:

• Bell, Allan. "Language style as audience design." Language in society 13.2 (1984): 145-204.
• Kiesling, Scott F., Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Jim Fitzpatrick, Xiaochuang Han, and Jacob Eisenstein. "Interactional stancetaking in online forums." Computational Linguistics 44, no. 4 (2018): 683-718.
• Pavalanathan, Umashanthi, and Jacob Eisenstein. "Audience-modulated variation in online social media." American Speech 90.2 (2015): 187-213.
• Rickford, John R. "Situation: Stylistic variation in sociolinguistic corpora and theory." Language and Linguistics Compass 8.11 (2014): 590-603.
• Finegan, Edward, and Douglas Biber. Register variation and social dialect variation: The register axiom. na, 2001.

Things Due:

Peer review of research project proposal

Week 10, Nov 5: Code Switching and Language Contact

Readings:

• Meyerhoff, Miriam, and Nancy Niedzielski. "The globalisation of vernacular variation." Journal of Sociolinguistics 7.4 (2003): 534-555.
• De Fina, Anna. "Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice." Language in society 36.3 (2007): 371-392.
• Stewart, Ian, Yuval Pinter, and Jacob Eisenstein. "S'io no, que penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media." Proceedings of NAACL (2018).
• Nguyen, Dong, Dolf Trieschnigg, and Leonie Cornips. "Audience and the use of minority languages on Twitter." Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2015.
• Rijhwani, Shruti, Royal Sequiera, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, and Chandra Shekhar Maddila. "Estimating code-switching on twitter with a novel generalized word-level language detection technique." In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1971-1982. 2017.
• Lo, Adrienne. "Codeswitching, speech community membership, and the construction of ethnic identity." Journal of sociolinguistics 3.4 (1999): 461-479.
• (optional) Bayley, Robert. "Presidential Address: Dialectology in a Multilingual America." American speech 92.1 (2017): 6-22.
• (optional) Shoemark, Philippa, Debnil Sur, Luke Shrimpton, Iain Murray, and Sharon Goldwater. "Aye or naw, whit dae ye hink? Scottish independence and linguistic identity on social media." In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). 2017.
• (optional) Ndubuisi-Obi, Innocent, Sayan Ghosh, and David Jurgens. "Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions." In Proceedings of the 57th Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2019.
• (optional) Solorio, Thamar, and Yang Liu. "Learning to predict code-switching points." Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2008.

Week 11, Nov 12: Orthography

Readings:

• Jaffe, Alexandra. "Introduction: Non‐standard orthography and non‐standard speech." Journal of sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 497-513.
• Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. "Non‐standard spellings in media texts: The case of German fanzines." Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 514-533.
• Tatman, Rachael. "# go awn: Sociophonetic variation in variant spellings on Twitter." Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle 25.2 (2015): 97-108.
• Honeybone, Patrick, and Kevin Watson. "Salience and the sociolinguistics of Scouse spelling: Exploring the phonology of the contemporary humorous localised dialect literature of Liverpool." English World-Wide 34.3 (2013): 305-340.
• J. Eisenstein. Systematic patterning in phonologically-motivated orthographic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19:161--188, 2015
• (optional) Preston, Dennis R. "The Li'l Abner syndrome: Written representations of speech." American speech 60.4 (1985): 328-336.

Week 12, Nov 19: Status and Power

Readings:

• Eckert, Penelope. "Language and power in the preadolescent heterosexual market." American Speech 86.1 (2011): 85-97.
• Milroy, Lesley, and James Milroy. "Social network and social class: Toward an integrated sociolinguistic model." Language in society 21.1 (1992): 1-26.
• Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. "The pronouns of power and solidarity." (1960): 76.
• Abitbol, Jacob Levy, Márton Karsai, Jean-Philippe Magué, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, and Eric Fleury. "Socioeconomic dependencies of linguistic patterns in twitter: A multivariate analysis." In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, pp. 1125-1134. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2018.
• Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian, Moritz Sudhof, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. "A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors." Proceedings of WWW (2013).
• Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar, Owen Rambow, and Mona Diab. "Predicting overt display of power in written dialogs." In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 518-522. 2012.
• (optional) Tannen, Deborah. "The relativity of linguistic strategies: Rethinking power and solidarity in gender and dominance." Discourse theory and practice: A reader (2001): 150-166.
• (optional) Raymond, Geoffrey, and John Heritage. "The epistemics of social relations: Owning grandchildren." Language in society 35.5 (2006): 677-705.
• (optional) Krishnan, Vinodh, and Jacob Eisenstein. "" You're Mr. Lebowski, I'm the Dude": Inducing Address Term Formality in Signed Social Networks." Proceedings of NAACL.  2015.
• (optional) Zhang, Qing. "A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity." Language in society 34.3 (2005): 431-466.

Week 13, Nov 26: Enregisterment

Readings:

• Squires, Lauren. "Enregistering internet language." Language in Society 39.4 (2010): 4
• Johnstone, Barbara. "Dialect enregisterment in performance 1." Journal of sociolinguistics 15.5 (2011): 657-679.
• Ilbury, Christian. "“Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE." Journal of Sociolinguistics (2019).
• Biber, Douglas, and Jesse Egbert. "Register variation on the searchable web: A multi-dimensional analysis." Journal of English Linguistics 44.2 (2016): 95-137.
• Thurlow, Crispin. "From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media." Journal of computer-mediated communication 11, no. 3 (2006): 667-701.
• (optional) Johnstone, Barbara. "Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect." American Speech 84.2 (2009): 157-175.
• (optional) Remlinger, Kathryn. "Everyone up here: Enregisterment and identity in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula." American Speech 84.2 (2009): 118-137.

Things Due:

Complete rough draft of your research paper (enough to be peer reviewed)

Week 14, Dec 3: Language Change

Readings:

• Stewart, Ian, and Jacob Eisenstein. "Making" fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline." Proceedings of EMNLP (2018).
• Litty, Samantha, et al. "Anything Goes: Extreme Polysemy in Lexical-Semantic Change." American speech 91.2 (2016): 139-165.
• Waters, Cathleen, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. "Is one innovation enough? Leaders, covariation, and language change." American speech 92.1 (2017): 23-40.
• Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian, Robert West, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. "No country for old members: User lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities." In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 307-318. ACM, 2013.
• Milroy, James. "Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization." Journal of sociolinguistics 5.4 (2001): 530-555.
• Bailey, Guy, et al. "The apparent time construct." Language variation and change 3.3 (1991): 241-264.
• Hamilton, William L., Jure Leskovec, and Dan Jurafsky. "Diachronic word embeddings reveal statistical laws of semantic change." Proceedings of ACL (2016).
• (optional) Kulkarni, Vivek, Rami Al-Rfou, Bryan Perozzi, and Steven Skiena. "Statistically significant detection of linguistic change." In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 625-635. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2015.
• (optional) Dubossarsky, Haim, Daphna Weinshall, and Eitan Grossman. "Outta control: Laws of semantic change and inherent biases in word representation models." Proceedings of the 2017 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP). 2017.

Things Due:

Peer review of draft

Week 15, Dec 10: Research Paper Presentations

Things Due:

Your presentation!

Acknowledgments

A special thanks (in alphabetical order) to Jacob Eisenstein, Jack Grieve, Dirk Hovy, Scott F. Kiesling, and Dong Nguyen for feedback on earlier drafts of the readings list.  Their thoughts and suggestions were fantastic, with some still to be incorporated.

PREREQUISITES:

SI 330, 507, 508, or general familiarity with programming

Students should also have a good understanding of programming and additional data analytics methods can be learned throughout the duration of the course, depending on the focus of study.

ACADEMIC HONESTY:

Unless otherwise specified in an assignment all submitted work must be your own, original work. Any excerpts, statements, or phrases from the work of others must be clearly identified as a quotation, and a proper citation provided.

Any violation of the University's policies on Academic and Professional Integrity may result in serious penalties, which might range from failing an assignment, to failing a course, to being expelled from the program.

Violations of academic and professional integrity will be reported to Student Affairs. Consequences impacting assignment or course grades are determined by the faculty instructor; additional sanctions may be imposed.

STUDENT MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING:

The University of Michigan is committed to advancing the mental health and wellbeing of its students. If you or someone you know is feeling overwhelmed, depressed, and/or in need of support, services are available. For help, contact Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) at (734) 764-8312 and https://caps.umich.edu during and after hours, on weekends and holidays, or through its counselors physically located in schools on both North and Central

Campus.

You may also consult University Health Service (UHS) at (734) 764-8320 and https://www.uhs.umich.edu/mentalhealthsvcs, or for alcohol or drug concerns, see www.uhs.umich.edu/aodresources.

For a listing of other mental health resources available on and off campus, visit: http://umich.edu/~mhealth/

INFORMATION FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES:

If you think you need an accommodation for a disability, please let me know at your earliest convenience.  Some aspects of this course, the assignments, the in-class activities, and the way we teach may be modified to facilitate your participation and progress.

As soon as you make me aware of your needs, we can work with the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) to help us determine appropriate accommodations.

SSD (734-763-3000; http://ssd.umich.edu) typically recommends accommodations through a Verified Individualized Services and Accommodations (VISA) form.

I will treat any information that you provide in as confidential a manner as possible.