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

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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.