FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Hansi Hettiarachchi (Computing, SPS, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Temporal word dynamics for online event detection in social media streams

ABSTRACT

In today’s digital era, social media have become primary platforms for disseminating newsworthy content, with most internet users relying on them for regular updates. Thus, understanding and detecting important events from social media data streams is vital for various applications ranging from crisis management to market analysis. However, the vast volume and unstructured nature of this data, generated by a diverse range of users, make manual detection methods highly labour-intensive. As a result, automated intelligent mechanisms have become essential for efficiently handling event detection tasks. However, most available social media event detection approaches primarily rely on data statistics, ignoring semantics, making them vulnerable to critical information loss. Following this gap, this presentation will explore how temporal word dynamics can be involved in achieving effective event detection from social media data.

TIME & PLACE

W09, 1500-1550, Thu 05th Dec 2024, Bowland North SR02. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

REGISTRATION

For accessibility, fire, and safety compliance, please register before attending.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Greta Esposito (PhD student in Linguistics, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Human interpretation and machine translation in law enforcement settings

ABSTRACT

Interpretation and translation services are widely used and accounted for in criminal justice systems across the world, where individuals who don’t speak the language of the legal systems they live in are legally entitled to be provided with language assistance (Art 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights).

However, as the form that this language assistance takes on varies from country to country, my research focuses only on interpretation and translation practices in the criminal justice system of England and Wales, and, specifically, on police interpreting and machine translation in the police context.

As police interpreting remains still under-researched, and linguistic outputs deriving from non-optimal interpretation/translation practices in the police setting can have serious legal consequences for the investigative process and the individuals involved, this talk will focus on (1) the reasons why linguistic analysis of authentic police data – interpreter-assisted police interviews in this case – could result in enhanced police practices in regard to interviewing strategies and the use of interpretation/translation services; (2) my hypotheses regarding the viability of machine translation software in high-stakes scenarios; and (3) the challenges I have faced so far in regard to data access, communicating with police forces and conveying the main points of my research to them.

If bridging the gap between academia and external institutions/bodies is the goal, sometimes it can be very difficult to achieve!

TIME & PLACE

W07, 1500-1550, Thu 21st Nov 2024, Bowland North SR02. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

REGISTRATION

For accessibility, fire, and safety compliance, please register before attending.