SAP Seminar, Dr Tessa Charlesworth
Using Natural Language Processing in Psychological Science
From the books we read, to the TV shows we watch, to the conversations we strike up on the bus home, language pervades every aspect of our daily lives. As a result, much of our psychology - our beliefs, attitudes, and representations of all sorts of concepts around us - is encoded through the words that we use. Recently, advances in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled psychologists to use massive amounts of archived text to study psychological representations at unprecedented scales. In this workshop talk, I will first provide an overview on the background and implementation of the NLP tool of word embeddings. Next, I will review two case studies from my own research that use word embeddings to study the strength of social biases across children and adults, as well as across 200 years of book text.
About the speaker
Dr Tessa Charlesworth is a social psychologist studying how and why our social attitudes and beliefs emerge and change across time, particularly across long time spans of a decade or more. To tackle these questions, she draws on interdisciplinary methods from computer science, econometrics, and political science, as well as from social, cognitive, and developmental science. Dr Charlesworth received her PhD in psychology from Harvard University, where she is currently completing a post-doctoral fellowship with Professor Mahzarin Banaji. She is funded jointly by the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative, the Hao Family Inequality in America Initiative, and the Foundations for Human Behavior at Harvard.
To register for this event, see link above.
