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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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"What do other people think?" has always been an important consideration to most of us when making decisions. Long before the World Wide Web, we asked our friends who they were planning to vote for and consulted Consumer Reports to decide which dishwasher to buy. But the Internet has (among other things) made it possible to learn about the opinions and experiences of those in the vast pool of people that are neither our personal acquaintances nor well-known professional critics --- that is, people we have never heard of. Enter sentiment analysis, a flourishing research area devoted to the computational treatment of subjective and opinion-oriented language. Sample phenomena to contend with range from sarcasm in blog postings to the interpretation of political speeches. This talk will cover some of the motivations, challenges, and approaches in this broad and exciting field.
Lillian Lee is a professor of computer science at Cornell University. Her research interests include natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. She is the recipient of the inaugural Best Paper Award at HLT-NAACL 2004 (joint with Regina Barzilay), a citation in "Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004" by Technology Research News (also joint with Regina Barzilay), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and her group'swork has been featured in the New York Times.
