Social Networks and Language

A large amount of the information available in social media like Twitter or Facebook is characterised by some kind of text (e.g., 140-character-long tweets) streamed over networks connecting text messages and individuals. While the fields of Computational Linguistics and Social Network Analysis have a longstanding and independent tradition, in recent years it has become apparent how the two aspects (text and network) cannot be fully studied and understood independently. This course presents an introduction to the field of network science and social network analysis, i.e., the analysis of human networks, then it introduces the main problems and approaches to process language used on social media, emphasising differences with more traditional sources, and finally covers the joint processing of information management on networks.