Understanding User-generated Content on Social Media

April 5, 2010
Meena Nagarajan | Kno.e.sis Research Center in Wright State University

In this talk I will cover some of my dissertation research that is devoted to the study of textual user-generated content on social media platforms. My work investigates the role of contextual information in discovering various types of semantic and experiential metadata from informal user-generated content toward the end goals of adding structure to unstructured utterances.

I will present my investigations along three aspects of understanding user-generated content:

Named entity recognition in informal text, with a focus on identifying cultural entities that allows us to trend and track their online mentions.
Understanding user intentions behind expressed content, with a focus on identifying transactional and information seeking intents that are typically exploited by question answering and targeted content-delivery systems.
Studying how users self-present on social media by observing the words they employ.

An understanding of such micro-level variables of content allows us to comprehend something new about the data and dynamics of social media. In this talk, I will also present my work on two deployed social Web applications that tap into crowd-sourced intelligence.

Speaker Details

Meena Nagarajan is a doctoral student in the Computer Science dept. at the Kno.e.sis Research Center in Wright State University and was previously at the University of Georgia where she pursued a Masters and Ph.D in Computer Science. She moved to Wright State in 2007 when her advisor Amit Sheth took up the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar position. She received her bachelors in Management Studies with a specialization in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, (BITS-Pilani) in India.Her doctoral thesis was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Microsoft Research, IBM Research Almaden, Univ. of California Berkeley and Hewlett Packard Labs. Her work was also supported by the IBM UIMA Innovation Award 2007 and Microsoft’s Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, 2008. She was also invited to give a keynote at the Social Data on the Web Workshop, collocated with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2009.More information about Meena Nagarajan can be found on her webpage http://knoesis.wright.edu/researchers/meena/homepage/