Speaker: Professor Brandon Stewart
Time: 2pm – 3:30pm
Location: 60 5th Avenue, 7th Floor, CDS Open Space
Abstract: Social scientists are increasingly turning to computer-assisted text analysis as a way of understanding the digital footprints left by communities and individuals. Much of the technology that powers these approaches is borrowed from the fields of computer science and statistics; yet, social scientists have substantially different goals. In this talk, the speaker will focus on three core social science tasks: discovery, measurement and causal inference. Using the example of the Structural Topic Model (STM), a bayesian generative model of text, the speaker will describe four components of developing tools for social scientists: proposing a theory of use, customizing a method, designing a workflow and creating validations.