Information Systems Department Seminar

Subjectivity and Social Role Recognition in Meetings

Theresa A. Wilson
Human Language Technology Center of Excellence
Johns Hopkins University

12 noon-1pm, Tue. 20 Nov. 2012, ITE459

Opinions, sentiments and other types of subjective content are an important part of any meeting. Meeting participants express pros and cons about ideas, they support or oppose decisions, and they make suggestions that may or may not be adopted. In this talk, I will present an annotation scheme for labeling subjective content in meetings, as well as experiments for recognizing subjective utterances and their polarity. Our experiments show that even very shallow linguistic features, such as n-grams of characters, can be effective for this task, and that the combination of classifiers using word, character, and phoneme n-grams yields the best result for subjective utterance recognition. Finally, I will discuss the application of subjectivity recognition to social role recognition in meetings.

Theresa Wilson is a research scientist working on opinion and sentiment analysis at the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE). Before coming to Johns Hopkins, she completed her post-doctoral research as part of the AMIDA Project (www.amiproject.org) at the University of Edinburgh Human Communication Research Centre. She received her Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008.

Information Systems Department Seminar

Subjectivity and Social Role Recognition in Meetings

Theresa A. Wilson
Human Language Technology Center of Excellence
Johns Hopkins University

12 noon-1pm, Tue. 20 Nov. 2012, ITE459

Opinions, sentiments and other types of subjective content are an important part of any meeting. Meeting participants express pros and cons about ideas, they support or oppose decisions, and they make suggestions that may or may not be adopted. In this talk, I will present an annotation scheme for labeling subjective content in meetings, as well as experiments for recognizing subjective utterances and their polarity. Our experiments show that even very shallow linguistic features, such as n-grams of characters, can be effective for this task, and that the combination of classifiers using word, character, and phoneme n-grams yields the best result for subjective utterance recognition. Finally, I will discuss the application of subjectivity recognition to social role recognition in meetings.

Theresa Wilson is a research scientist working on opinion and sentiment analysis at the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE). Before coming to Johns Hopkins, she completed her post-doctoral research as part of the AMIDA Project (www.amiproject.org) at the University of Edinburgh Human Communication Research Centre. She received her Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008.

Ranking intelligence members discuss Libya and the details of the Petraeus affair as it relates to national security.

The now infamous Petraeus affair has churned into an unsavoury cocktail of foreign policy, politics and sex.

High flying General Petraeus was appointed with great fanfare as director of the CIA by President Obama.

But he has now crashed to earth as Petraeus was outed and resigned on grounds of infidelity to his wife. But to some it was his personal infidelity to his country as the director of secret keeping that did him in. 

Others are upset that a personal affair should be allowed to interfere with a professional career…particularly for a valuable professional like General Petraeus. Should those involved in intelligence be held to higher standards in terms of fidelity due to the nature of their jobs?

Over this weekend’s Meet The Press, two senators on the intelligence committee mentioned that Petraeus’ FBI investigation began with a “counter-intelligence threat” where the secret was found. Obama said there was no threat to national security, but the investigation is not over…

Among other things under investigation for security are the Obama administration’s handling of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya.

CLIMB UP Summer 2013 will be held from early June 2012 through Friday August 2, 2013 (Monday-Friday 8:30-5PM).

Highlights include...

• Orientation and Laboratory Safety Training Course
• Individualized Research
• Weekly Breakfast Workshops: Friday Mornings
• Visits to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus
• Learning about fellowship/scholarship opportunities
• The “Buffalo Wing Social”
• Field Trips to Niagara Falls and other Western New York attractions!!
• Lasting friendships and mentoring relationships
• CLIMB UP Final Research Presentations
• Summer Research Day with other UB summer programs: Friday August 2, 2013.

You will spend your days in the laboratory of your research mentor, whom you will be paired with based on your research interests. We will train you in various areas necessary to safely and efficiently perform your research and related activities

Our combination of research, academic, and social activities make for an exciting and worthwhile summer experience!