The Search for Emotions, Creativity, and Fairness in Language

Speaker: Dr. Saif M. Mohammad (he, him, his)
Senior Research Scientist, National Research Council Canada

Date: May 8, 2023
Location: LMU main building (Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1), room A015

Abstract: Emotions are central to human experience, creativity, and behavior. They are crucial for organizing meaning and reasoning about the world we live in. They are ubiquitous and everyday, yet complex and nuanced. In this talk, I will describe our work on the search for emotions in language – by humans (through data annotation projects) and by machines (in automatic emotion and sentiment analysis systems). I will outline ways in which emotions can be represented, challenges in obtaining reliable annotations, and approaches that lead to high-quality annotations and useful sentiment analysis systems. I will discuss wide-ranging applications of emotion detection in natural language processing, psychology, social sciences, digital humanities, and computational creativity. Along the way, I will discuss various ethical considerations involved in emotion recognition and sentiment analysis — the often unsaid assumptions and the real-world implications of our choices.

Bio: Dr. Saif M. Mohammad is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Research Council Canada (NRC). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Before joining NRC, he was a Research Associate at the Institute of Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests are in Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially Lexical Semantics, Emotions and Language, Computational Creativity, AI Ethics, NLP for psychology, and Computational Social Science. He is currently an associate editor for Computational Linguistics, JAIR, and TACL, and Senior Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review. His word–emotion resources, such as the NRC Emotion Lexicon and VAD Lexicon, are widely used for analyzing emotions in text. His work has garnered media attention, including articles in Time, SlashDot, LiveScience, io9, The Physics arXiv Blog, PC World, and Popular Science.
Webpage: saifmohammad.com