Computer Science Colloquium: Who Wrote THAT? Computational Analyisis of Style and Authorship

Speaker

Dr. Shlomo Argamon
Illinois Institute of Technology

Abstract

Do men write differently from women? Can we figure out someone’s age from the way that they write? What might linguistic analysis tell us about scientific methodology? In this talk, Dr. Argamon will describe how we approach such questions using computational models – these methods of “computational stylistics” enable us to answer these questions and more, by analyzing large bodies of text using forms of data mining. Such application is non-trivial, as many potential pitfalls must be avoided. It can also be tricky to produce results that can be interpreted meaningfully. The talk will include our results on several problems, including determining the gender of a text’s author and of fictional characters (in Shakespeare), and analyzing variation in rhetorical style among peer-reviewed scientific articles. We view this work as a potential nexus for fruitful collaborations between computer scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This research is partially supported by the NSF and the Binational Science Foundation, and has been carried out in collaboration with several colleagues and students.

Bio Sketch

Dr. Shlomo Argamon is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which he joined in 2002. He previous held academic positions in Israel at Bar-Ilan University, where he held a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship (1994-96), and at the Jerusalem College of Technology. Dr. Argamon received his B.S. (1988) in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University, and his M.Phil. (1991) and Ph.D . (1994) in Computer Science from Yale University, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. His current research interests lie mainly in the use of machine learning methods to aid in functional analysis of natural language, with particular focus on questions of style. During his career, Dr. Argamon has worked on a variety of problems in experimental machine learning, ranging from robotic map-learning, to theory revision, to natural language processing, and has over 50 papers published in these areas.

Dr. Argamon has served as Workshop Chair for CIKM and on the program committees of various international conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, ACM CIKM, NAACL/HLT, BISFAI, CSFL). He also organized the first ever workshop on Computational Approaches to Style at IJCAI'03. Further efforts for this emerging research community include: Co-chairing the AAAI Fall Symposium on Style and Meaning (2004), co-chairing an ACM SIGIR workshop on Textual Stylistics in Information Access (2005), and co-editing a book on computational stylistics. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Association for Computational Linguistics, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.