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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Towards an Actionable Understanding of Conversation
 s
DTSTART:20210125T140000
DTEND:20210125T150000
DTSTAMP:20260410T232727Z
UID:1e9bfa01a4e261f71fa7734dc00b0e02d60c961b9e604e8e1562250c
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Justine Zhang - Cornell University\nIC Faculty candidate\n
 \nAbstract:\nConversations are central to our social systems. Understandin
 g how conversationalists navigate through them could unlock great improvem
 ents in domains like public health\, where the provision of social support
  is crucial. To this end\, I develop computational frameworks that can cap
 ture and systematically examine aspects of conversations that are difficul
 t\, interesting and meaningful for conversationalists and the jobs they do
 . Importantly\, these frameworks aim to yield actionable understandings—
 ones that reflect the choices that conversationalists make and their conse
 quences\, beyond the inert linguistic patterns that are produced in the in
 teraction.\n\nIn this talk\, I will describe two complementary efforts in 
 this direction\, addressing the internal dynamics of conversations and the
 ir broader impacts. First\, I will present an unsupervised methodology to 
 model conversationalists' interactional choices\; I will then formally des
 cribe the problem of drawing causal links between conversational behaviour
 s and outcomes. I will talk about these projects in the context of a crisi
 s counseling service\, where the conversational stakes and challenges face
 d by counselors are especially salient.\n\nBio:\nJustine Zhang is a PhD ca
 ndidate in the Information Science department at Cornell University. She f
 ocuses on developing computational frameworks to study conversations. Her 
 research engages with a wide range of fields\, spanning natural language p
 rocessing\, computational social science\, political science\, psychologic
 al counseling\, and economics. Previously\, she completed a bachelor's deg
 ree in computer science at Stanford University. She is a recipient of the 
 Microsoft PhD Fellowship.\n\nMore information\n\n 
LOCATION:https://epfl.zoom.us/j/88995267845?pwd=b1lhbUNVWnBiZm9maUkrUHdRNm
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STATUS:CONFIRMED
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