May Meetup: Corpus Linguistics, Geolocating Tweets, and Enhancing Speech Signals

This May, look forward to talks on narrative schema across corpora, techniques to geolocate Twitter users, and enhancing speech signals over background noise:

• Dan Simonson (https://twitter.com/thedansimonson) is a third year PhD candidate at Georgetown University in the Department of Linguistics. His presentation addresses whether narrative knowledge is helpful in the cross-comparison of corpora. It builds on the work of Chambers and Jurafsky (2008, 2009), which extracts narrative schema, and devises a measure for the cross-comparison of sets of schema.

• Ryan McKeown (https://twitter.com/RWMcKeown) has a PhD in theoretical physics from Penn State University and is currently employed as a data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton. He'll be presenting his recent work on determining the geo-location of Twitter users based on multiple classifiers combining NLP techniques and social network analysis.

• Carol Espy-Wilson (https://www.isr.umd.edu/faculty/espy-wilson) is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland. Dr. Espy-Wilson's research is in speech communication. She combines knowledge of digital signal processing, speech science, linguistics and acoustic phonetics to conduct interdisciplinary research in speech recognition, speech production and speaker recognition. Espy-Wilson is the CEO of OmniSpeech (http://www.omni-speech.com/), an innovative software company aiming to revolutionize the enhancement of voice communication in speech-enabled applications and in digital mobile devices. She will speak about OmniSpeech (https://twitter.com/OmniSpeech).

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!