From text to thought: Advancing cognitive and social sciences with natural language processing
Ming Hsu, Professor
Business, Haas School
Check back for status
As a fast growing branch of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) has made it possible to uncover subtle patterns and hidden trends in large-scale real-world text data. It offers researchers and practitioners powerful tools to efficiently derive novel insights and predictions that are otherwise expensive or even impossible to obtain. Among the most exciting of these recent advances is extracting insights about what we know and how we learn, which has begun to help us address some of the most challenging questions about the nature and origins of human thought, knowledge, and biases.
This research project aims to develop and apply cutting-edge data science, especially NLP, techniques for challenging problems in cognitive science and human behavior, and more broadly in social sciences. Student researchers will be exposed to cutting-edge research at the intersection of natural language processing and these disciplines, with the unique opportunity of validating data-driven insights with empirical data of human behavior. Students will explore new applications and extensions of these models, with applications spanning diverse fields and disciplines, including psychology, economics, neuroscience, and marketing.
Role: Specifically, student researchers will be trained to (1) mine online content ranging from news media, social media, and academic publications, (2) develop computational models that utilize semantic relationship embodied by real-world text corpora to capture relationships between concepts, ideas, and thoughts, and (3) combine these models with computational social science models to predict real-world and laboratory behavior and outcomes.
Qualifications: Required: Strong computational and programming skills, interest in computational social science.
Desirable, but not essential: Experience with natural language processing and text analysis
Hours: to be negotiated
Related website: http://
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology Digital Humanities and Data Science