Using Text Processing Tools to Study Polish & Lithuanian Social Media - Spring 2020

*PLEASE APPLY THROUGH START'S WEBSITE HERE, NOT THROUGH HANDSHAKE. IF YOU ONLY APPLY THROUGH HANDSHAKE YOUR APPLICATION WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED.

The University of Maryland Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) is a sibling unit to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). ARLIS conducts research related to national security for the Department of Defense in the areas of human and social systems (including culture, language, and communication); artificial intelligence and human-system integration; and information engineering and advanced computing.

 

Large-scale analysis of text (including social media text) for computational social science benefits from the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools such as sentiment/emotion analysis, authorship profile algorithms, topic modeling, text re-use detection, and narrative tracking. These, in turn, benefit from lower-level language processing tools (such as morphological analysis and named-entity detection) as well as from databases (such as sentiment lexicons, knowledge bases, and lists of named entities). One way to improve NLP tools is through targeted annotation for previously unknown vocabulary items, such as domain-specific terms or newly coined words.

This particular internship is related to a recently awarded Minerva project that involves examining narratives and emotions in Eastern European social media. Specifically, in Spring 2020, we are examining Facebook and YouTube from Poland and Lithuania.

 

As an intern on this project, you will learn ways to use NLP tools to study social media text in Polish and/or Lithuanian. Depending on your skills and language background, you may explore how to improve and retrain those tools for better coverage of the data, or use a suite of existing tools to do an analysis of some interesting aspect of social media (such as tracking narratives across groups, platforms, or languages).

Depending on skills and interests, you may help collect new corpora related to corpora already being collected as part of the Minerva grant. Depending on the needs of the investigators, you may also be asked to occasionally provide other research assistance support, such as formatting conference or paper submissions (e.g., references/citations) and editing documents.

 

 

Supervisor: C. Anton Rytting (crytting@umd.edu)

Deadline: Sunday, October 27th, 2019; 11:59 pm

US Citizenship Required: Not required.

Team Meeting Times: TBD

Work Location: UMD Patapsco Building (near the College Park Metro station)

 

● Programming experience (at least 2 years) in Python (preferred), Java, C, or a similar programming language. 

● Interest in human languages and/or (multilingual) human language technology

 

● Familiarity with Polish, Lithuanian, and/or Russian languages and the structural understanding of their grammars strongly preferred.

● Basic familiarity with Linux and/or with natural language processing (NLP) strongly preferred.

● Familiarity with machine learning, data science, and/or advanced statistics preferred.

START Headquarters is located in the Discovery District in College Park, MD. Our exact address will be provided upon being invited for an interview. All internship hours must be completed at this office unless otherwise specified. Working remotely is not permitted. 

Orientation Date: Thursday, January 23rd, 2020. All interns are required to attend orientation. You may be required to attend an additional day of orientation on Friday, January 24th, 2020. Your supervisor will inform you if you are required to attend both days.

Internship Duration: Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 to Friday, May 8th, 2020. All interns must be able to commit to the duration of the whole program.

Work Hours: All interns must work at least 10 hours per week during the spring 2020 program. Work hours are scheduled from Monday to Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm. Interns may not work longer than 8-hour shifts.

How to Apply for START Internships:

START is currently accepting applications for the spring 2020 semester. Please make sure you check the dates for the projects you’re interested in to make sure they’re available during the semester you intend to apply. The spring application form will be open until 11:59pm on Sunday, November 10th, 2019. However, some projects for the spring semester require the application be submitted by the priority deadline (Sunday, October 27th at 11:59pm) so please be sure to note the deadlines in the project descriptions. Late, incomplete, or applications not submitted correctly will not be considered. To access the application: click here.

Notes:

Application Materials:

All internship applicants must submit all materials in one .pdf file using the file name format:

LastName, FirstName_InternCandidate.pdf or .doc.

 The internship application packet should include the following documents in the following order:

Note for International Students:

START welcomes applications from international students for all of our internships where US citizenship is not a requirement (see the qualifications listed for each project for details).

It is, however, the responsibility of the applicant to ensure that their visa or immigration status permits them to undertake an unpaid internship. It is also the responsibility of the applicant to ensure that all proper paperwork, like documented approval from your home institution, is available and processed in time for the start of the internship. Failure to comply with these stipulations, or provide the paperwork required to verify your status, will result in your internship offer being rescinded without further consideration. START is unable to sponsor visas for non-US Citizens due to the short timeline of our program and the lengthy processing time for visas. Unfortunately, this largely limits our ability to accept anything other than F-1 visas on regular, not OPT, status.