Arab tavasz és nlp

Mostanában nagyon rákattantam a "computational social science" témára, mivel úgy látom nagyon gazdag terület, amiben az nlp-nek is sok szép szerep jut(hat). Trey Causey a University of Washington PhD hallgatója az autoriter államok médiáit vizsgálja empirikus alapon, ehhez pedig nagyban támaszkodik a látens dirichlet allokációra (latent dirichlet allocation - LDA) a korpuszelemzésben. Disszertációjának összegzése szerint:

I model these meaning contests using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a Bayesian method for discovering the latent topic structure of text corpora. Using an original dataset of more than 25,000 Egyptian and international news articles in both Arabic and English from November 2010 to March 2011, I build a model of regime-friendly, semi-independent, and independent media content before, during, and after the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain. In the months leading up to the uprisings, while Egyptian state media focused on economic development projects and minimized attention to rising discontent int he region, non-state media offered extensive coverage of investigations of businessmen linked to the regime and fraudulent elections. When events in Tunisia ignited political imaginations in the region, state media consistently downplayed these events relative to their independent counterparts and employed conspiracy, foreign interference, and instability themes in their coverage. However, as the fall of the Mubarak regime drew closer, media coverage converged distinctly toward the language of independent media. I argue that this divergence and subsequent convergence around highly salient issues provides important information to potential collective actors about the ability and likely success of pro- and anti-regime groups to exert influence.

The Battle for Bystanders: Information, Meaning Contest, and Collective Action in the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 című tanulmányában a disszertációnál tömörebben foglalja össze Causey téziseit és módszertanát - érdemes elolvasni, hiába "draft", van benne valami. Úgy gondolom, hamarosan sok hasonló vizsgálódás lát majd napvilágot és bizonyosan az ipar is rákap az ilyen kutatások ízére.