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Workshop IV: Mathematical Analysis of Cultural Expressive Forms: Text Data

May 23, 2016 - May 27, 2016

Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), Los Angeles, California.

Comprehensive collections of texts data stretching back in time to the beginning of writing have become increasingly available in machine actionable form. Similarly, millions of "born digital" texts are flooding the virtual world on a daily basis, from tweets, to blog posts, to other cultural expressive forms. This workshop focuses on the leading approaches to (a) extracting entities, topics, or narrative patterns from large, unstructured collections of text and analyzing them to (b) derive meaning from textual data and (c) understand the dynamics of social interactions or historical change. These approaches include text mining tools, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, textual memes, cross-language information retrieval, trend analysis, information retrieval, recommendations, and predictions of whether something will go "viral". Mathematical tools include Bayesian models, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, optimization, and statistical language modeling techniques.

www.ipam.ucla.edu/caws4