Alan RitterAssistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
The Ohio State University
Office: 595 Dreese Lab
Email: ritter.1492@osu.edu
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=unXtH3IAAAAJ
Semantic Scholar: https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Alan-Ritter/2268403
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CSE 5539: NLP and IE for the Social Web

The recent explosion of user generated content in online social media presents a wealth of new opportunities for data analytics applications. Structured data is just the tip of the iceberg; most of this data is locked up as unstructured text, which is difficult for current algorithms to process. There has been growing interest in adapting natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction (IE) technology to this data, as well as identifying new opportunities for applications on big, noisy, informal text data. Examples include computational social science, user modeling, personalization, news recommendation, event detection and more.

The course will involve reading and discussing recent papers from top conferences in the field. Students will propose and complete an open-ended course project; example projects might include anything from extracting a concert calendar from Twitter to automatically generating answers to health questions in online patient forums.

While the course will cover some technical material, emphasis will be on applications and building systems rather than mathematical details. Some prior coursework in Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning will be very helpful.