Computational approaches for uncovering implicit strategies in political discourse | Julia Mendelsohn

Abstract: When discussing politics, people often use subtle linguistic strategies to influence how their audience thinks about issues, which can then impact public opinion and policy. For example, anti-immigration activists may frame immigration as a threat to native born citizens’ jobs, describe immigrants with dehumanizing vermin-related metaphors, or even use coded expressions to covertly connect immigration with antisemitic conspiracy theories. This talk will focus on the development of computational approaches to analyze three strategies: framing, dehumanization, and dogwhistle communication. I will discuss how I draw from multiple social science disciplines to develop typologies and curate data resources, as well as how I build and evaluate natural language processing models for detecting these strategies. I further analyze the use of these strategies in political discourse across several domains, and assess the implications of such nuanced rhetoric for both society and technology.