MIDAS COVID-19 Special Seminar Series: Life during COVID-19: a Billion-word Story as Told by a Natural Language Processing Researcher- Rada Mihalcea

Rada Mihalcea
Professor, EECS – College of Engineering, University of Michigan

Life during COVID-19: a Billion-word Story as Told by a Natural Language Processing Researcher

In the span of just three months, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world in unimaginable ways. Not only has it dramatically affected our health system, but it has also drastically changed our daily lives. In this talk, I will share what we learned about life during COVID-19 from large-scale natural language processing analyses performed on social media datasets and extensive surveys. Among others, we found major changes in group perception, large shifts in emotions, a different set of responsibilities for care givers, and generally new views on what current and future life looks like. This is joint work with James Pennebaker, Laura Biester, Ashwini Ashokkumar, with contributions from several other researchers at the University of Michigan and University of Texas.