Extracting Social Meaning from Everyday Language: Food, Dating, and Innovation

What kinds of information about social and economic factors can we extract automatically from everyday language?  We investigate domains like food (restaurant menus and reviews) and dating (recordings of speed dates), showing how restaurant menu language conveys signals of economic and social status, reviews display the psychological traits of the writers, and what the linguistic cues are to successful dates. We also use on-line texts to investigate how innovation spreads from person to person in linguistic and scientific communities.