Welcome!
I am a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), in the Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) program. My thesis (proposal abstract, full) is about the computational integration of text data and relational data to support actionable meaning in socio-technical networks. My committee are Kathleen M. Carley, William W. Cohen, Carolyn P. Rose and Jeff Johnson (ECU).
In my research I aim to span the boundary between natural language processing (NLP) and relational data analysis (aka network analysis). This work is driven by my search for a better understanding of the co-evolution and interplay of the semantics and mechanics of real-world networks. CMU and the CASOS lab have been a great environment for doing this kind of interdisciplinary computational work. I started out by being a developer for AutoMap; a software tool built to support users in performing a wide range of NLP routines, network analysis of text data, and content analysis. For this endeavor, my previously acquired degree in communication science came in useful.
From a technical and methodological perspective, I am concerned with the informed, accurate and efficient extraction of network data from natural language text data. I am combining theory from linguistics and communication science with methods from network analysis and computing, especially machine learning and artificial intelligence. This work has led me to the development of new techniques for network analysis of texts. Since the evaluation of relation extraction results can be tricky due to a lack of ground truth data and access to subject matter experts, I am also working on testing the robustness of information and relation extraction techniques, i.e. the impact of text mining methods on network data and data analysis.
From a theoretical and empirical perspective, I am interested in the computational integration of semantic analyses and real-world networks. I have been applying this approach to study various dynamic and complex socio-technical systems, such as small teams of collaborators, geopolitical entities (e.g. the Sudan), and the Enron corporation. Much of this work is embedded in team efforts in the CASOS center, e.g. a recent project on culture and narratives in virtual worlds.