development.html

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title: Development
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<p>In our the weekly research meetings led by the University of Texas at
Austin PI, faculty, visiting scholars, staff, graduate students and
undergraduate students discuss the development of text analysis tools in other
languages, and the research projects on computational linguistics and text
processing. Members of the research team have access to the current
dictionaries and software, along with computers and common servers to store
and access corpora that are specific to the current grant project. The
multidisciplinary nature of the research project demands that collaboration
occurs at all stages, and that multiple students work on the same tools and
corpora together. For example, in order to develop our software tools in other
languages, linguists are required to organize features of language according
to special grammatical features, but psychologists are also required to
identify those features of language that have been shown to be most indicative
of certain psychological states and social roles. Foreign language experts who
are either students in the lab or visiting scholars are required to work on
expanding the dictionaries due to their expertise and familiarity with the
foreign languages. Computational linguists and computer scientists are
required to develop applications and usability of the software itself. All
students and faculty work on the more applied research together, which
consists of analyzing the corpora for social features. Students have presented
at regional, national, and international conferences. The faculty have
presented at these conferences in addition to other university settings.
Nearly all of the publication on this grant has students as co-authors.</p>

<p>An additional activity this year, following from a stated Year 2 milestone
in the Addendum to the original proposal, was that a new graduate level course
was created and taught based on methods and studies of relevance to the area
of the project. The 15 week class (taught by PI Beaver at the University of
Texas) was entitled Social Meaning and Social Language Processing.</p>