The Doctoral Consortium on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science will be held in conjunction with the Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, at the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), November 2-6, in Austin, Texas.
Motivation: With the rise of social media, digitized archives, and e-government, natural language processing (NLP) and social science are becoming increasingly intertwined. NLP research and applications now touch on language's social function, necessitating greater engagement with social science theories and methods. In turn, social scientists are discovering the potential of "text as data", providing a new computational window on longstanding social science research questions. The emerging study of sociotechnical systems and computer-mediated communication raises issues that are fundamentally interdisciplinary, requiring insights and breakthroughs from both the computational and social sciences.
Building on these trends, this doctoral consortium aims to bring together students and faculty mentors across NLP and the social sciences, to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-pollination. The consortium event is part of a workshop at EMNLP, one of the top conferences in natural language processing. Student participants will have the opportunity to present their dissertation work, and will be paired with a senior researcher as a mentor. Applications are welcome from doctoral students in both the social sciences and in computer science. Members of groups that are underrepresented in computer science are especially encouraged to apply.
Important dates
August 12, 2016: Submissions due
September 5, 2016: acceptance notifications
November 6, 2016: workshop