RI: Email, Social Networks, and Organizations: Investigating How We Use Language to Create and Navigate Social and Organizational Relations

这个项目研究人类语言交流的三个方面：交流中使用的语言(例如，无论是正式的还是非正式的)，传播者的社会网络的拓扑结构(例如，说话者是否嵌入一个紧密联系的群体中)，以及传播者在组织中所扮演的角色(例如，说话者是高层管理人员还是行政助理)。过去，计算机科学家和社会学家孤立地分析这些方面，而社会语言学家和语言人类学家则详细阐述了定性的联合模型。该项目使用安然电子邮件语料库作为测试平台，开发这三个方面的计算联合模型，重点关注在电子通信中可以可靠和自动分析的语言特征(如话题、体裁和言语行为)和拓扑抽象(如子组分析)。这项工作正在通过具体的预测任务进行评估，例如根据一个人的拓扑结构和交流的语言内容预测一个人的组织角色，以及根据两个人的有限交流样本预测两个人未来沟通的可能性。这项工作预计将有各种潜在的应用，无论是对普通公众来说，都是以改善电子邮件客户端和访问电子邮件的软件的人机交互的形式，以及对执法和情报部门来说，在开发发现领导力和预测沟通行为的自动化技术方面都有潜在的应用。

This project studies three aspects of human linguistic communication: the language used in the communication (for example, whether formal or informal), the topology of the social network of the communicators (for example, whether the the speaker is embedded in a single tight-knit group), and the roles the communicators occupy in an organization (for example, whether the speaker is an upper-level manager, or an administrative assistant). In the past, computer scientists and sociologists have analyzed these aspects in isolation, while sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have elaborated qualitative joint models. The ever-increasing flow of electronic communication offers new opportunities to analyze and quantitatively model these aspects of communication.The project uses the Enron email corpus as a testbed for the development of computational joint models of these three aspects of communication, focusing on linguistic features (such as topic, genre, and speech act) and topological abstractions (such as subgroup analysis) that can be reliably and automatically analyzed in electronic communication. The work is being evaluated via concrete prediction tasks, such as the prediction of a person's organizational role based on the topology and linguistic content of their communication, and the prediction of how likely two people are to communicate in the future based on a limited sample of their communications.The work is expected to have various potential applications, both for the general public, in the form of improved human-computer interaction for email clients and software that accesses email, and for the law enforcement and intelligence communities, in the development of automated techniques for discovering leadership and predicting communicative behavior.