Shlomo  Argamon

Can a computer tell the difference between right and wrong, or distinguish a male from a female? These sorts of questions are at the heart of research being explored by Associate Professor of Computer Science Shlomo Argamon. He has established a strong research program in artificial intelligent and machine learning at IIT, and is considered a leader in the emerging discipline of computation linguistics with machine learning. This future-forward area of research involves using machine learning to analyze written texts for subtle style differences that lie below the word or clause level. This work is teaching computers to identify differences in authors—their gender, age and where they live—and giving computers the ability to judge one from another. One of Argamon's projects involved using automated text classification techniques to test computers' aptitude at distinguishing male characters from female characters in Shakespeare's classic plays.