If James Bond were a Linguist

MIT is hosting the 2010 Empirical Methods in Natural Langauge Processing conference this year, and I noticed a clustering of papers in the program that would make for a fun session, possibly titled “Linguistic Security”. The session would cover both offense (what can we tell about you from the language you use) and defense (how can you hide messages in your word choice).

Since the EMNLP program is already fixed, the “2010 Ted’s Blog Workshop on Linguistic Security (TBWLS)”, will have to suffice :).

Here’s the program. Each item is taken from the real program:

• Keynote: Why do we call it decoding?
  Kevin Knight
• Improving Gender Classification of Blog Authors
  Arjun Mukherjee and Bing Liu
• Modeling Perspective using Adaptor Grammars
  Eric Hardisty, Jordan Boyd-Graber and Philip Resnik
• Practical Linguistic Steganography using Contextual Synonym Substitution and Vertex Colour Coding
  Ching-Yun Chang and Stephen Clark
• A Latent Variable Model for Geographic Lexical Variation
  Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O'Connor, Noah A. Smith and Eric P. Xing