Social Network Extraction from Texts: A Thesis Proposal

In my thesis, I propose to build a system that would enable extraction of social interactions from texts. To date I have defined a comprehensive set of social events and built a preliminary system that extracts social events from news articles. I plan to improve the performance of my current system by incorporating semantic information. Using domain adaptation techniques, I propose to apply my system to a wide range of genres. By extracting linguistic constructs relevant to social interactions, I will be able to empirically analyze different kinds of linguistic constructs that people use to express social interactions. Lastly, I will attempt to make convolution kernels more scalable and interpretable.