Events

Past Event

Dan Jurafsky - “Does This Vehicle Belong to You?” Processing the Language of Policing for Improving Police-Community Relations

December 5, 2017
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
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Davis Auditorium, Columbia University, 530 W 120th Street, New York

Speaker: Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University, Linguistics and Computer Science

Police body-worn cameras have the potential to play an important role in understanding and improving police-community relations. This talk describes a series of studies conducted by our large interdisciplinary team at Stanford that use speech and natural language processing on body-camera recordings to model the interactions between police officers and community members in traffic stops. We use text and speech features to automatically measure linguistic aspects of the interaction, from discourse factors like conversational structure to social factors like respect. This talk will also describe the differences we find in the language directed toward black versus white community
members, and offer suggestions for how these findings can be used to help improve the fraught relations between police officers and the communities they serve.

This event is free and open to the public; please visit the website for more details.

Dan Jurafsky is Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, is the co-author with Jim Martin of the widely-used textbook “Speech and Language Processing”, and co-created with Chris Manning one of the first massively open online courses, Stanford’s course in Natural Language Processing. His trade book “The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu” was a finalist for the 2015 James Beard Award. Dan received a B.A in Linguistics in 1983 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992 from the University of California at Berkeley, was a postdoc 1992-1995 at the International Computer Science Institute, and was on the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder until moving to Stanford in 2003. His research ranges widely across computational linguistics; special interests include natural language understanding, human-human conversation, the relationship between human and machine processing, and the application of natural language processing to the social and behavioral sciences.

This event is part of the Data Science Institute Colloquium and is sponsored by the Data Science Institute.