What Are We Talking About? Natural Language Processing in Organizations

This symposium is designed to advance research on organizational communication by bringing together leading scholars examining state- of-the-art applications of natural language processing. Language is endemic to almost every aspect of an organization - we talk and write to each other all the time. However, the dominant paradigms for studying social interactions involves indirect measures of communication - for example, by manipulating language in a lab experiment, or by surveying people about their previous interactions. These methods allow researchers to structure their data in advance. But naturally occurring data from communication - the text and speech itself - is unstructured, and presents many common analytical challenges for those who care about the consequences of that communication. The presentations in this symposium demonstrate how that communication can be measured directly. Each presenter considers natural language data from common and difficult conversations throughout an organization. And in each case, natural language processing is used to show that the content of the communication has direct consequences for organizational outcomes. Across different field settings, we show how our analyses can also provide evidence for biases and information gaps that can inform behavioral models of decision-making in an organization. Computational Consumer Segmentation and Brand Management Presenter: Ada Aka; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Presenter: Sudeep Bhatia; U. of Pennsylvania Presenter: Gideon Nave; - Presenter: Christopher Olivola; Carnegie Mellon U. Language as a Window into the Mind: A Computational Approach to Organizational Identification Presenter: Lara Yang; - Modelling the Tightness-Looseness Tradeoff Between Self-Regulation and Creativity Presenter: Joshua Jackson; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Presenter: Michele Gelfand; Stanford Graduate School of Business Building an interpretable NLP system to encourage civil discourse Presenter: Michael Yeomans; Imperial College Business School Presenter: Burint Bevis; Imperial College Business School