While the humanities are not generally thought of as computational fields, they have an increasing role in advancing technologies in our everyday world. Human analysis of language, for example, can elevate existing technologies for enhanced societal impact and inform the development of new technological affordances for changing the landscape of interdisciplinary research. In the OSU English department, researchers are taking both central and collaborative roles in design, development, and evaluation of computational work by applying linguistic insights to increase the accuracy of artificial intelligence and to leverage big data in rapidly tracking language use. 

This panel discussion will introduce three such projects at OSU. The first is an NSF-funded intelligent tutoring system for scientific writing. The second was funded by Oklahoma Humanities to identify characteristics of quality paraphrases and contribute to the automatic processing and creation of paraphrased text. The final project is a suite of tools for analyzing language use on social media, developed as a component of a dissertation. The discussion will highlight how applied linguists are expanding the diverse opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration and inserting the HUMANities into computation.

Presenter(s)

Moderator: Hannah Bingham Brunner