Applications

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is extraction of useful information. Now the concept of "usefulness" varies, even among the savants of the same field. But we'll take a broader approach to evade any controversy as much as possible.

For example, talking about Chemistry, as I had pointed out already, we may look into whether the colloquialisms reveal any new or interesting chemical data, or whether they refer to some specific compound or a formula. Implicitly we assume here that "new" will be useful, but that may not be true everywhere.

Another good application that comes to my mind is Emotion Analysis. It has several subfields like Metaphor Mining, Sarcasm Mining, etc. Opinion Mining is another good idea.

A big question: will the general people benefit from these technical achievements?

Answer: Most definitely. To see why, we need to consider the general people itself. People are more likely to express their inner thoughts and opinions in colloquialisms and spoken English, which often results in terse spoken terms or even slang terms. Presence of these terms in a written document may court serious consequences, and that's the reason people generally do not refer to them while writing something - they mask their actual ideas and opinions with something more tolerable and readable.

Bottomline: Formal documents fail to give us the actual expressions protagonists had in mind; they only supply the approximate or ethically correct ones. If we would like to know what they really thought about, we need to look at what they spoke (or, for that reason, what they wrote in blogs, which are much less prone to open public criticisms).

Question: Why would we be concerned about what people have in their minds?

Answer: There are reasons. Imagine yourself a big firm-owner. You'd like to reap as much benefit as possible from your employees. This is precisely the reason you'd like to make them as much happy as possible, for making them happy is a crucial step in getting any work done. Now, in general, your employees wouldn't open their mind to you; they'll open it to someone else - probably colleagues or family-members. So you can never determine whether he's happy or not, by only looking at formal situations. You may have to meet his colleagues or family-members, or at least, read his blog and see whatever he might have put up there. Now that impacts the incentive you'll get from your employee.

There are other reasons. Imagine yourself a security personnel. You'd like to check the record of suspects, convicts and criminals. Now, those records reflect only superficial facts - not the ones they actually have in their minds, not the big schemes they're probably interested in. They won't ever talk about those to you, either. Don't even expect it. So you can either eavesdrop, and listen intently to what they are doing with their mates, or still better, keep a record of their chats (and blogs, if there's any). Now these people are so cunning that they won't utter those things in chats or blogs. But still you might get a clue. For example, one or two codewords, expressed in colloquialisms and slangs, may turn you on. You can prevent some big attacks this way. But a prerequisite is a vocab of criminal slangs and codewords. So as we can see, it has important relations with Cryptography and Security. We may actually need to break a code (expressed in colloquial or slang form) to learn their intention.

There are other examples like parent-child relationship, teacher-student relationship, etc. Our task will benefit and help to thrive these relationships. In this way, we need to be concerned in some way about Sociology as well, for it provides a very fertile ground for searching relationships. Whenever there is a relationship with some constraints (such that one party may hold back some information from the other), be it personal or professional or formal, there is an application of our work.

Enough about big examples and applications. In a nutshell, whenever some people REALLY wants to know something about some other people, there is an application of our work.