Mission Big Data makes for big and interesting problems! Our lab focuses on analyzing large-scale text streams such as news, blogs, and social media to identify cultural trends around the world's people, places, and things.
Our research covers a range of topics in natural language processing. A current focus is using Deep Learning techniques to build concise representations of the meanings of words in all significant languages, and use these powerful features to recognize entities and measure sentiment and other properties of texts. Another focus involves analyzing Wikipedia to identify the fame and significance of historical figures as reported in our book Who's Bigger? and associated website. Our Lydia technology has been licensed by General Sentiment, a social media analysis startup.