SXSW 2012

Social media includes lots of free-form textual data in "natural languages", the languages people speak. Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps you analyze that data. Some NLP problems are very hard, but a number of lightweight NLP techniques are available in open-source tools. You can use these to improve your social media applications, even if you're not a computational linguist. In this session, I will introduce some of these techniques and tools, and I will give hints on getting started using NLP in your social media applications. Many NLP techniques require training corpora, sets of annotated documents. I will talk about constructing and maintaining a training corpus. And, I will talk about some of the ways we use NLP at Lithium Technologies.