Dr. Maite Taboada - Fantastic internet comments and where to find them

Please join us as we welcome Dr. Maite Taboada, Professor of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University, director of the Discourse Processing Lab, and Affiliate Member of the UBC Language Sciences Initiative, for her talk Fantastic internet comments and where to find them.  Dr. Taboada’s research combines discourse analysis and computational linguistics, with an emphasis on discourse relations and sentiment analysis. Current work focuses on the analysis of online comments, drawing insights from corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and big data.

Abstract

“I provide an overview of my current research on discourse and computational methods to analyze social media language. The first part of the talk will be devoted to outlining the two frameworks for this research: rhetorical relations and sentiment analysis. Rhetorical relations are the fundamental building blocks of discourse, connecting propositions to make coherent text. I will describe existing research on rhetorical relations, and present a study on how relations are signalled by discourse markers and other linguistic devices. Then I introduce my work on sentiment analysis, and on the role that rhetorical relations and other contextual factors play in the interpretation of sentiment and opinion. 

The second part of the talk is devoted to describing a current project, analyzing online news comments in terms of constructiveness and toxicity. Using a large corpus of comments, I describe how we have modelled constructiveness in terms of rhetorical and argumentation relations, and toxicity as a type of extreme negative sentiment.”

All are welcome!  Light refreshments will be served.  Please RSVP at https://bit.ly/2ymv9Ij.  Students and post-doctoral fellows in Dr. Taboada’s lab and Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed’s lab will be giving short presentations in the Lillooet Room from 11:30am – 12:45pm, so if you can join us early, please do!