Saif M. Mohammad
Short bio:
Dr. Saif M. Mohammad is a Principal 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, Computational Affective Science, AI Ethics, and Computational Social Science. He is currently an associate editor for Computational Linguistics 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 significant media attention, including articles in Time, SlashDot, LiveScience, io9, The Physics arXiv Blog, PC World, and Popular Science.
Webpage: http://saifmohammad.com
Abstract:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made much progress in the area of sentiment analysis. Yet, much of it has focused on automatically classifying pieces of text. In this tutorial, I will present an introduction to Affective Science and argue that NLP is uniquely positioned to contribute to it: to boldly explore a new frontier — to use language and computation to ask fundamental questions about how emotions and affect work, including:
- How do language and interoceptive (bodily) signals shape emotion?
- How do emotions impact health and behaviour?
- What agency do we have in regulating our emotions? etc.
As case studies in this nascent area of research (NLP for Affective Science), I will present my work on:
- WorryWords, Words of Warmth: Large lexicons of anxiety and warmth associations for English words; what they tell us about how we acquire language and how we express stereotypes.
- Emotion Dynamics and Emotion Granularity: Quantifying characteristics of emotion change and our ability to differentiate different emotions (using text); and its correlation with health outcomes.
- The Language of Interoception: Using language to shed light on the affectual connection between the body and mind.
I will conclude with a discussion of ethical considerations relevant to affective research, grounded in theory and best practices. This talk is a vision of Computational Affective Science that advances our understanding of emotion and human experience, builds useful applications, and plays an active role in navigating the societal implications of the powerful underlying technologies.