A thousand words might be worth more than a picture

Malvina Nissim, Groningen University, The Netherlands

Abstract

There is a lot of information in what we write and in the way we do it. And this is not only about the content, but also about the author of a text. What do the texts we write reveal about ourselves? Through a series of experiments, I will discuss various aspects of author profiling, highlighting successes and failures of machines (and humans!) that try to disclose latent characteristics of authors from their writings.

Bio

Malvina Nissim is Adjunct Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, with a Chair in Computational Linguistics and Society. She has extensive experience in sentiment analysis and author identification and profiling, as well as in modelling the interplay of lexical semantics and pragmatics, especially regarding the computational treatment of figurative language and modality. She is the author of 100+ publications in international venues, is member of the main associations in the field, and annually reviews for the major conferences and journals. She has recently co-chaired the Fourth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2017), and was the general chair of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2018). She is also active in the field of resource and system evaluation, as both organiser and participant of shared tasks, and is interested in the philosophy behind them. She graduated in Linguistics from the University of Pisa, and obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pavia. Before joining the University of Groningen, she was a tenured researcher at the University of Bologna (2006-2014), and a post-doc at the Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology of the National Research Council in Rome (2006) and at the University of Edinburgh (2001-2005). In 2017, she was elected as the 2016 University of Groningen Lecturer of the Year.