BIGDATA: IA: Multiplatform, Multilingual, and Multimodal Tools for Analyzing Public Communication in over 100 Languages

Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Award Number: IIS-1838193

Co-Is/Co-PIs: Prakash Ishwar, Lei Guo, Derry Wijaya

Abstract:

In today’s information age, understanding public communication flows around the world is important to United States policy and diplomacy. The challenge for research is to collect, analyze, and interpret information as it is presented worldwide, creating big data that is flowing at high velocity, in large volumes, with much variety in perspective, language, and platforms. Analytic methods for studying textual and visual public information worldwide are limited by language hurdles. This project aims to solve data analytics problems in the domain of international public information flows by developing methods that effectively leverage natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision tools.

This research will involve collecting multilingual, multiplatform, and multimodal corpora of text and images originating in the U.S. and reported worldwide, developing an interactive budget-efficient methodology for annotation by experts and crowdworkers that scales effectively, using machine learning and deep learning techniques that exploit multilingual and multimodal representations to develop data analytics tools for entity and frame recognition, sentiment analysis of entities and frames, and curating balanced real-time content collections for many languages. This project is expected to generate analytical tools for social scientists and others to better examine the international flow of public communications. The annotated data will provide training and benchmark datasets that can propel research in entity and frame recognition, sentiment analysis, and other related natural language processing tasks for many languages.

This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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