The ever-increasing volume of publicly available unstructured text data is a rich opportunity to better inform evidence-based policymaking, while also presenting a huge challenge in making meaning of this data, especially at scale. Corpus and computational linguists have an important contribution to make to this effort, not only in addressing technical challenges, but also in shaping the range and impact of language science and language analytics. Bill Marcellino from the RAND Corporation will talk about these challenges and opportunities for impact, primarily in terms of national security—the US military, the intelligence community, and public diplomacy—but also in behavioral and behavioral health issues.
Bill Marcellino is a social and behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, and a professor text analytics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Marcellino was trained as a sociolinguist and corpus linguist, and received his Ph.D. in rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University. He has a leading role at RAND in the development of analytic methods and toolsets, including RAND-Lex, RAND's proprietary text analytics suite. Marcellino specializes in and teaches text analytics methods for big datasets (e.g. social media), as well as qualitative research methods. His research includes information operations, operational security, military behavioral health, and counter-violent extremism/terrorism.