SSP Forum: Zijian Wang and Thomas Yim (M.S. Candidates)

Monday, May 11, 2020
Zoom Meeting - Online
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The
Symbolic Systems Forum
presents

How Crime Narratives Shape Subjective Assessments of Guilt
Zijian Wang (M.S. Candidate)
Symbolic Systems Program

and

Analyzing Changes in Human Beliefs in the Context of Literature (From the Perspectives of Psycholinguistics and Philosophy)
Thomas Yim (M.S. Candidate)
Symbolic Systems Program

Monday, May 11, 2020
12:30-1:20 pm
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    Meeting ID: 921 4675 5757
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ABSTRACTS:

(1) Zijian Wang, "How Crime Narratives Shape Subjective Assessments of Guilt" (Primary Advisor: Chris Potts, Linguistics; Second Reader: Dan Jurafsky, Linguistics and Computer Science)
Crime reporting is a prevalent form of journalism with the power to shape public perceptions and social policies. How does the language of these reports act on readers? We seek to address this question with the SuspectGuilt Corpus of annotated newspaper crime stories. For SuspectGuilt, annotators read short crime articles and provided text-level ratings concerning the guilt of the main suspect as well as span-level annotations indicating which parts of the story they felt most influenced their ratings. SuspectGuilt thus provides a rich picture of how linguistic choices affect subjective guilt judgments. In addition, we build high-quality predictive models based on SuspectGuilt and show that these models benefit from joint supervision from the text-level ratings and span-level annotations. Such models might be used as tools for understanding the effects of crime-reporting on a large scale.

(2) Thomas Yim, "Analyzing Changes in Human Beliefs in the Context of Literature (From the Perspectives of Psycholinguistics and Philosophy)" (Primary Advisor: Cécile Alduy, French and Italian; Second Reader: Marisa Galvez, French and Italian)
Human beings change or update their beliefs for various reasons. This has broad implications on the empirical world because human actions are largely driven by their beliefs. The study engages in an analysis of the book of Maurice Barrès, Uprooted, to examine how key characters change their beliefs and how the author attempts to change the way of thinking of his readers. It draws on theories and research of psychology, linguistics and philosophy to shed light on the factors and the process of beliefs changes as well as on the nature of human beliefs. A literary angle adds nuances and insights into this topic, in contrast to a single empirical research that has limited generalizability.