March 2014 Meetup: Machine Translation, Twitter Analysis & Sentiment Analysis

This month, we're featuring three speakers on a couple of very interesting topics:

• Achim Ruopp (https://twitter.com/AchimRuopp) specializes in translation automation, internationalization and multi-lingual NLP. He believes that machine translation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation) (MT) is not just for the big guys and academia, but that everybody can build MT systems for their languages and use case. He works on making the tools and knowledge for do-it-yourself MT available as widely as possible. His talk will cover a brief (local) history of MT, a short introduction to the basics of statistical MT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation) (SMT) and its essential ingredients, and how to get (customized) SMT to break down language barriers for your use case.

• Casey Tesfaye (https://twitter.com/FreeRangeRsrch) is local researcher employed at the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/statistics) and author of the Free Range Research blog (http://www.freerangeresearch.com/). Her talk will be about her work for an AAPOR (https://www.aapor.org/Home.htm) 2014 panel presentation entitled Reporting Data in the Social Media World. Her goal is to use the "women physics" Twitter search stream to analyze the interpretations, misinterpretations and trajectories of published findings in survey research.

• Nathan Danneman (https://twitter.com/NDanneman) received his PhD in political science from Emory University, with focuses in international conflict and applied statistics. He currently works as a Data Scientist at Data Tactics (http://www.data-tactics.com/), where he works on a range of topics including geospatial analysis, outlier detection, and text analysis. He will present Item Response Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory) models as a means of unsupervised sentiment analysis.

We'll meet at 6:30pm in the upstairs bar at Stetsons near the intersection of 16th and U Streets NW in Adams Morgan. Introductions & announcements will start around 7:00pm, and presentations will begin at 7:30pm. Afterwards, there'll be plenty of time for follow-up questions, networking, and drinks.

Please note: Stetsons is a 21 and over venue.

DC NLP meets on the second Wednesday of each month to network, socialize, and learn about the interesting work folks are doing in natural language processing, computational linguistics, text analytics, and more.

Do you have something you'd like to share with the group? Let us know! We're always looking for speakers to give talks at future meetups, and don't forget to follow @DCNLP (https://twitter.com/DCNLP/) on Twitter!