Does this Vehicle Belong to You?
Processing the Language of Policing for Improving Police-Community Relations


Presented by:
DAN JURAFSKY, Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities, 
Professor and Chair of Linguistics, Professor of Computer Science  
Stanford University

Abstract: Police body-worn cameras have the potential to play an important role in understanding and improving police-community relations. This talk covers a series of studies conducted at Stanford that use speech and natural language processing on body-camera recordings to model the interactions between police officers and community members during traffic stops. Researchers draw on computational linguistic models of dialogue structure and of interpersonal relations like respect to automatically quantify linguistic aspects of the interaction from text and audio. The differences found in the language directed toward black versus white community members are described, and suggestions are offered for how these findings can be used to help improve relations between police officers and their communities.  


Results from using computational methods to uncover historical societal biases, and detect framing, agenda-setting and political polarization in the media will also be presented. Together, these studies highlight how computational linguistic methods can help us interpret latent social content behind the words we use.


Dan Jurafsky is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on the extraction of meaning, intention, and affect from text and conversation, on Chinese language processing, and on applying natural language processing to the social and cognitive sciences. Dan is the co-author of the widely-used textbook Speech and Language Processing and co-taught the first massive open online class on natural language processing. The recipient of a 2002 MacArthurFellowship, Dan is also a 2015 James Beard Award Nominee for his book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.  

In the meantime, to learn more about his research, check out his website: https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/