The large amount of language available online today makes it possible to think about how to learn from this language to help address needs faced by society. In this talk, McKeown will describe research in our group on summarization and social media analysis that addresses several different challenges. They have developed approaches that can be used to help people live and work in today’s global world, approaches to help determine where problems lie following a disaster, and approaches to identify when the social media posts of gang-involved youth in Chicago express either aggression or loss.