NSCC/LA: Collaborative Research: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes

NSCC/LA：合作研究：威权政权中的话语和社会动态建模

• 批准号: 0904822
• 负责人: Jeffrey Hancock
• 金额: $ 95.09万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-15 至 2014-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0904822&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NSCC; LA; Collaborative; Research; Modeling

This award was funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between NSF and the Department of Defense. The ways people use words can provide insights into their thoughts, motives, and relationships with others. Discourse patterns can be modeled to predict deception, status, group processes, emotional states, and personality. An important question is whether the relationship between discourse and social dynamics can be extended to create predictive models of social processes across multiple languages and cultures, and among military, political and civilian organizations in authoritarian regimes. The specific goals of the project are a) to define and compare the ways natural language reflects social dynamics through the analysis of a wide range of documents across languages and cultures, b) to develop annotated and socially indexed multi-language databases of communication (e.g., English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean), along with preliminary research tools that can enhance our ability to conduct research across languages and cultures, and c) to address key national security questions emerging from the collection of vast amounts of digitized documents and communication, such as the capability to understand past actions and cognitions of previous regimes and assess emerging threats. The project will focus on three types of social dynamics: a) Leadership, identity and group dynamics, and the degree to which the psychological and social identities of people and groups can be determined through writing and speech; b) Cohesion of text and social processes, and whether it is possible to identify the connections among people in a social group, such as the stability of the group and likelihood of defection, by comparing the ways the group members separately use words; and c) Deception and misinformation, and whether it is possible to identify deception and deceptive intent from language-based cues. A cross-cutting research theme is the complexities of conducting computational analysis of discourse and social dynamics across multiple languages and translated corpora. For example, to what degree does translation distort the link between language and social dynamics? The project will advance social science theory, developing new models linking language use with social dynamics and providing a new way of looking at large cross-sections of a society. New computational methods will be developed that can be applied to large, representative samples of text from across an entire country's political and cultural landscape. These methods, unlike traditional analytical methods, do not require individual analysis by highly trained social scientists and historians and can provide the capacity to process documents that may number in the millions. These developments and findings will advance analyses of social dynamics that were not previously possible and can assist scientists and practitioners, such as security analysts, in understanding information flow and social structure at a macroscopic level. Such knowledge could potentially help security analysts to pinpoint individuals and groups that merit direct study by trained experts.

该奖项是通过国家安全，冲突和合作竞争的社会和行为层面资助的，这是NSF和国防部之间的合资企业。人们使用词语的方式可以洞察他们的思想，动机以及与他人的关系。 话语模式可以被建模来预测欺骗、地位、群体过程、情绪状态和个性。 一个重要的问题是，话语和社会动态之间的关系是否可以扩展到创建跨多种语言和文化的社会进程的预测模型，以及在专制政权的军事，政治和民间组织。该项目的具体目标是：a）通过分析跨语言和文化的各种文档，定义和比较自然语言反映社会动态的方式，B）开发注释和社会索引的多语言通信数据库（例如，英语、阿拉伯语、中文、西班牙语和韩语），沿着初步研究工具，这些工具可以提高我们跨语言和文化进行研究的能力，c）解决从收集大量数字化文件和通信中出现的关键国家安全问题，例如了解过去的行动和对前政权的认知以及评估新出现的威胁的能力。该项目将着重于三种社会动态：（a）领导、身份和群体动态，以及通过写作和演讲确定个人和群体的心理和社会身份的程度; B）文本与社会过程的衔接，以及是否有可能识别出一个社会群体中人与人之间的联系，如群体的稳定性和叛逃的可能性，通过比较小组成员分别使用单词的方式; c）欺骗和错误信息，以及是否有可能从基于语言的线索中识别欺骗和欺骗意图。一个跨学科的研究主题是跨多种语言和翻译语料库进行话语和社会动态计算分析的复杂性。例如，翻译在多大程度上扭曲了语言与社会动态之间的联系？该项目将推进社会科学理论，开发将语言使用与社会动态联系起来的新模型，并提供一种新的方式来看待社会的大截面。新的计算方法将被开发出来，可以应用于来自整个国家的政治和文化景观的大型，有代表性的文本样本。与传统的分析方法不同，这些方法不需要训练有素的社会科学家和历史学家进行单独分析，并且可以提供处理数百万份文件的能力。这些发展和发现将推进以前不可能的社会动态分析，并可以帮助科学家和从业人员，如安全分析师，在宏观层面上理解信息流和社会结构。 这些知识可能有助于安全分析人员查明哪些个人和团体值得训练有素的专家直接研究。