Jose Camacho-Collados (Cardiff)

Title: Natural Language Processing and Social Media: Challenges, Applications and TweetNLP

Abstract: Social media represents a fundamental tool to understand the interactions and progress of society in the 21st century. Despite the large amount of information generated in social media platforms, understanding what is going on is not an easy task, even after the significant NLP progress in recent years. Its multilingual, dynamic, informal and multimodal nature means that standard techniques are seldom optimal.

In this talk, I will summarise some of the latest advances on social media processing, and in particular the development of specialised language models. I will also explain our latest project that addresses the temporal and dynamic nature in social media, with evaluation studies involving language modelling, named entity recognition and topic classification.

Finally, I will present our latest release, TweetNLP (tweetnlp.org), stemming from an international collaboration between academia and industry. TweetNLP is an integrated platform that enables a simple usage of cutting-edge NLP models for social media. I will quickly showcase TweetNLP’s online demo and will discuss a few applications for social media research, in particular for analysing political communication.

Bio: Jose Camacho-Collados is a Senior Lecturer and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Cardiff University, leading the Cardiff NLP group. Before joining Cardiff University, he completed his PhD in Sapienza University of Rome and was a Google AI PhD Fellow. Until recently, his research has focused on various semantics aspects in NLP with a distributional perspective. He wrote the “Embeddings in Natural Language Processing" book and is the current program co-chair of *SEM 2023. More related to the topic of the talk, in the last few years Jose has been working in social media analysis and applications, developing NLP tools specifically targeted to this domain.