What are We Talking About? Natural Language Processing in Organizations.

Text is a rich and naturally-occurring source of data throughout all organizations, but it is not trivial to analyze - it is high-dimensional, sparse, and context-dependent. Each presenter focuses on building scaleable and interpretable models of how people communicate inside organizations. Across all four examples in this symposium, natural language processing is employed to directly observe the contents of organizational communication, and suggest simple conversational interventions that might support the broader goals of the organization. The topic of each of the presentations concerns an interpersonal communication challenge of central interest to OB scholars, such as feedback, team work, and reputation management. Each presentation offers a novel application from a suite of modern advances in natural language processing, including open-source software implementations that can be used to replicate our methods in other domains. Each work considers the managerial implications of natural language processing by drawing on a distinct theoretical framework for the goals of communication in each domain. This allows our work, as a whole, to outline a scope of what is possible in future applications of these natural language processing in organizational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]