Using language to save the world: Information extraction tools for social media and medical data analysis

July 27, 2018, 10 am

GESIS, Köln, conference room west I

Dr. Diana Maynard

Abstract

The GATE open source NLP toolkit has been in continuous development for 20 years at the University of Sheffield. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of our language analysis work, giving examples of real-life case studies. In particular, I will focus on three main areas of interest: analysing patient records to improve medical research,  investigating the correlation between the public’s environmental behaviour and social media, and tools for assessing critical information during disasters such as earthquakes. Perhaps surprisingly, these all use many of the same underlying techniques. The analysis component includes entity and topic recognition, semantic annotation and entity linking, informativeness assessment, and sentiment analysis, In particular, I will focus on the text analysis lifecycle, ranging from twitter collection to text analysis, indexing, querying and visualisation of results, as well as crowdsourcing and evaluation tools.

About the speaker

Diana Maynard is a Senior Researcher at the University of Sheffield, where since 2000 she has led the development of Sheffield’s open-source multilingual text analysis tools, and has led research teams on a number of UK and EU projects. Her main research interests are in tools for language technology, information extraction, sentiment analysis, social media analysis and terminology.  Dr. Maynard recently worked on the EU DecarboNet project, developing social media analysis tools for investigating attitudes towards climate change, and currently works on various projects around social media and news media analysis, including use of social media during crises in the EU COMRADES project. She is currently PI of the EU KNOWMAK project, developing tools for mapping the European research space. She regularly provides consultancy and training on text analytics and use of GATE in both the public and private sector, as well as widespread community engagement through talks, tutorials, conferences and publications.