大象传媒

Keynote presentation at the in Munich: "Measuring gender bias using Natural Language Processing".

The event at the meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. I had so much fun talking about the Gender Gap Tracker!

I attended the European Conference in AI in Santiago de Compostela and was interviewed about the lab's research on hate speech detection.

Paper on an interesting construction in English, which we dubbed the 'adverb-ly adjective' construction. This is the result of a long research process, which started in 2017 with 3 authors on 3 continents! Our wonderful communications officer, Nicole North, wrote a story about the research process.

- Taboada, M., C. Goddard and R. Trnavac (to appear) English Language and Linguistics.

Plenary talk about mis/disinformation from a linguistic point of view. .

I gave a plenary presentation at the conference of the German Linguistics Society() on "Computational evaluation".

Our paper on data and methods to detect 'fake news' and misinformation just appeared in the Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation: 
- Asr, F.T., M. Mokhtari and M. Taboada (2023) Misinformation detection in news text: Automatic methods and data limitations. In Maci, S., M. Demata, M. McGlashan and P. Seargeant (eds.) . Routledge. 79-102.

Paper accepted! Work with the on conflict in online conversations:
- Canute, M., M. Jin, h. holtzclaw, A. Lusoli, P. Adams, M. Pandya, M. Taboada, D. Maynard, W. Chun (2023) Dimensions of online conflict: Toward modeling agonism. Findings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Singapore. December 2023. Also available on .

Katharina Ehret and I were interviewed by Robbie Love, of the wonderful :
- "". CorpusCast. Online.

NEW! Paper on the Radar de Parit茅, a tool to analyze gender representation in French news stories:
- Soumah, V-G., P. Rao, P. Eibl and M. Taboada (2023). Proceedings of the 36th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Montr茅al. Jun 2023.

We are presenting the research behind the Radar de Parit茅 this week in Montr茅al!!

Check out the full paper to find out why we think large language models won't solve all NLP problems 馃く

鈥� Maite Taboada (@maite_taboada)

I gave a talk on the Gender Gap Tracker at the online series organized by the Spanish Society for NLP. Video is available:
- ""

I have been interviewed by several Spanish media about my research on toxicity online.
- , El Confidencial
- , El Mundo
- , El Peri贸dico de Catalunya

I am a newly elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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- 大象传媒 announcement
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I am !!

New section of the publications page, with Video lectures and presentations that I have done over the years and that you can still find online.

New NSERC Discovery Grant "Natural language processing for detecting toxic, abusive, and hateful language online". Read all about it in the .

New funding from OBVIA to carry out . I'm looking forward to a collaboration with colleagues at Universit茅 Laval!

Mind the Gap: repr茅sentation des dans les qu茅b茅cois durant la
Chercheur principal: Richard Khoury
Cochercheuses et cochercheurs
Josette Brun ULaval ULaval ULaval

鈥� OBVIA (@ObservatoireIA)

produced by where Sen茅n Barro, Pablo Gamallo and I discuss language technology (in Spanish).

A summary of our contributions on the Gender Gap Tracker:
1. Dashboards and code:

• - Main dashboard with summary results: .
• - Research dashboard with text analyzer and topic modelling results:
• - Code:

2. Op-eds and commentary:

• - P. Rao, L. Chambers and M. Taboada. "". Blog post. November 30, 2022.
• - P. Rao, M. Taboada and S. Graydon. "". Poynter. October 28, 2021.
• - M. Taboada "". The Conversation. November 25, 2020.
• - M. Taboada and F. Torabi Asr. 鈥溾��. The Conversation. February 3, 2019. (Translated as "".)

3. Academic papers:
• - Rao, P. and M. Taboada (2021) . Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 鈥� Language and Computation 4(82). doi: 10.3389/frai.2021.664737.
• - Asr, F.T., M. Mazraeh, A. Lopes, V. Gautam, J. Gonzales, P. Rao and M. Taboada (2021) PLoS ONE 16(1): e0245533.

Op-ed on the Gender Gap Tracker and its third birthday:

• - P. Rao, M. Taboada and S. Graydon. "". Poynter.   October 28, 2021.

Op-ed on online toxicity,  in Policy Options, the digital magazine of the Institute for Research on Public Policy:

• - M. Taboada. "". Policy Options. October 6, 2021.

Op-ed on the language of fake news, in Items, the journal of the Social Sciences Research Council:

• - M. Taboada. 鈥溾��. Items 鈥� Insights from the Social Sciences. September 7, 2021.

Our paper received the !!!

The paper: Taboada, M., J. Brooke, M. Tofiloski, K. Voll and M. Stede (2011) . 37 (2): 267-307.

The Test of Time Award recognizes "papers that have had long-lasting influence on the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics."



Citation, from the video of the award ceremony: 鈥淭his paper shows how a lexicon-based approach can be effective for sentiment analysis, and more importantly, also stable and portable across domains. Despite the current dominance of learning-based methods, lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis keep being relevant, particularly in new domains where large training data isn鈥檛 available and where portability is crucial.鈥�

An update on our project about online news comments. Three more papers (#8, #9, and #10  below) on news comments and a summary of our findings:

1. Raw data
   • - Kolhatkar, V., H. Wu, L. Cavasso, E. Francis, K. Shukla and M. Taboada (2018) . Simon Fraser University. 
   • - GitHub page, with link to download the corpus:
2. Paper describing the raw data (with small annotations)
   • - Kolhatkar, V., H. Wu, L. Cavasso, E. Francis, K. Shukla and M. Taboada (2020) . Corpus Pragmatics 4: 155鈥�190.
3. Annotated data (12,000 comments), in collaboration with
   
   • - Kolhatkar, V., Thain, N., Sorensen, J., Dixon, L., Taboada, M., 2020. C3: The Constructive Comments Corpus. Jigsaw and Simon Fraser University. Dataset. DOI: .
4. Paper describing the large-scale annotation
   • - Kolhatkar, V., N. Thain, J. Sorensen, L. Dixon and M. Taboada (to appear) Classifying constructive comments. First Monday. Available on arXiv:
5. Register analysis: Are news comments like conversations? (tl;dr: NO)
   • - Ehret, K. and M. Taboada (2020) Are online news comments like face-to-face conversation? A multi-dimensional analysis of an emerging register. Register Studies 2(1): 1-36.
6. Subjectivity analysis: How complex are news comments vs. opinion articles? (tl;dr: it's complex)
   • - Ehret, K. and M. Taboada (2021) The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse. 23(2): 141-165.
7. Constructiveness and toxicity across 3 newspapers:
   • - Op-ed. Gautam, V. and M. Taboada. 2019. 鈥溾��. The Tyee.
8. NEW!!! Register analysis, again. If not like conversation, what are comments like? (Answer: a hybrid register):
   • - Ehret, K. and M. Taboada (2021) . 4(79): 10.3389/frai.2021.643770.
9. NEW!!! Appraisal analysis. Comments are very negative. They tend to express evaluation as Judgement or Appreciation (rather than Affect).
   • - Cavasso, L. and M. Taboada (2021) . J 4: 1-38.
10. NEW!!! Concessive relations in comments. Concessions have an interpersonal function and are used for evaluation and argumentation, especially in constructive comments.
    
    • - G贸mez-Gonz谩lez, MLA and M. Taboada (2021) 174: 96-116.

We have learned a lot about online news comments. Mostly, that they are very complex and more like essays than casual conversation.

Paper with Luca Cavasso on online news comments

Cavasso, L., & Taboada, M. (2021). A corpus analysis of online news comments using the Appraisal framework. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, 4, 1鈥�38. DOI:

Findings, 1/6

鈥� Maite Taboada (@maite_taboada)

Gender Gap Tracker paper now published:
- Asr, F.T., M. Mazraeh, A. Lopes, V. Gautam, J. Gonzales, P. Rao and M. Taboada (2021) 16(1): e0245533.
Our findings:

1. In 2 years of Canadian news media, the percentage of women quoted is regularly below 30%
2. Women authors quote more women
3. Politicians dominate in the news
4. NLP can help us find these patterns in data
   

Paper on the in with the fab team in the Discourse Processing Lab: Junette Gonzales

鈥� Maite Taboada (@maite_taboada)

We have been working for almost 3 years now on a project analyzing the gender gap in Canadian media. We have created a  with overall statistics and a analyzing topics and top-quoted sources. We can also now share the great news that a research paper on the Gender Gap Tracker has been accepted for publication:
- Asr, F.T., M. Mazraeh, A. Lopes, V. Gautam, J. Gonzales, P. Rao and M. Taboada (to appear) .

Op-ed on women quoted during COVID-19:
- . The Conversation. November 25, 2020.

Op-ed by Lucas Chambers and Maite Taboada on media coverage of elections:
- . Canadian Science Policy Centre. November 3, 2020.

The lab has been busy analyzing online news comments. Here, all in one place, are the papers and the data that we have produced:

1. Raw data
   • - Kolhatkar, V., H. Wu, L. Cavasso, E. Francis, K. Shukla and M. Taboada (2018) . Simon Fraser University.
   • - GitHub page, with link to download the corpus:
2. Paper describing the raw data (with small annotations)
   • - Kolhatkar, V., H. Wu, L. Cavasso, E. Francis, K. Shukla and M. Taboada (2020) . Corpus Pragmatics 4: 155鈥�190.
3. Annotated data (12,000 comments), in collaboration with
   
   • - Kolhatkar, V., Thain, N., Sorensen, J., Dixon, L., Taboada, M., 2020. C3: The Constructive Comments Corpus. Jigsaw and Simon Fraser University. Dataset. DOI: .
4. Paper describing the large-scale annotation
   • - Kolhatkar, V., N. Thain, J. Sorensen, L. Dixon and M. Taboada (to appear) Classifying constructive comments. First Monday. Available on arXiv:
5. Register analysis: Are news comments like conversations? (tl;dr: NO)
   • - Ehret, K. and M. Taboada (2020) Are online news comments like face-to-face conversation? A multi-dimensional analysis of an emerging register. Register Studies 2(1): 1-36.
6. Subjectivity analysis: How complex are news comments vs. opinion articles? (tl;dr: it's complex)
   • - Ehret, K. and M. Taboada (to appear) The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse. Discourse Studies.
7. Constructiveness and toxicity across 3 newspapers:
   • - Op-ed. Gautam, V. and M. Taboada. 2019. 鈥溾��. The Tyee.

We have learned a lot about online news comments. Mostly, that they are very complex and more like essays than casual conversation.

Discourse Lab member Fatemeh Torabi Asr just won the 大象传媒 President鈥檚 Emerging Thought Leader Newsmaker of the Year Award for 2019!
You can read the about her award, and she wrote about her research on misinformation and fake news, which has reached almost 69,000 reads.

Presentation at the in Vancouver, discussing the .

talking about the Gender Gap Tracker right now at !!!

鈥� vasundhara 馃懇鈥嶐煉火煑ｏ笍馃�嗮煆筹笍鈥嶐煂� (@VasundharaNLP)

I am part of a project funded by to study and counter abusive language online, with Wendy Chun of 大象传媒 as PI.

I wrote a for the newsletter of the . I argue that much of corpus linguistics can be thought of as 'research for good'.

I am Acting Associate Dean, Research & International in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Featured on the

We analyzed more than 1.5 million comments from 3 news organizations. We found more constructive comments than we expected, that toxicity happens equally across topics and that some news outlets have better commenters than others. The full story:
- Gautam, V. and M. Taboada (2019) . Report. Simon Fraser University. November 2019.

We also published a short version as an op-ed for The Tyee:

- Gautam, V. and M. Taboada. . The Tyee (online). November 6, 2019.

, has been available online for a while. Now the paper describing it is also online:
- Kolhatkar, V.,H. Wu, L. Cavasso, E. Francis, K. Shukla and M. Taboada (to appear) . .

Our paper on writing-intensive instruction in linguistics classes is now out! Available for free:
- Pappas, P., M. Taboada and K. Alexander (2019) . 95(3): e339-e363.

I am participating in a project that studies online abuse against candidates in the 2019 Canadian federal election:
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PIs: Heidi Tworek, Chris Tenove, University of British Columbia

Discourse Processing Lab postdoc Fatemeh Torabi Asr publishes .
- Discussed in this .
- Reprinted by , by , by , by , by .

You can hear me discuss the Gender Gap Tracker in Spanish, gracias a
Or read the article in .

The Peak, 大象传媒's newspaper, wrote that mentions my poster presentation on work with Rada Trnavac and Cliff Goddard.

Paper on data quality for misinformation detection now available, open access:
Asr, F.T. and M. Taboada (2019) . January-June 2019:1-14.
- Paper too long to read? There's a !

We just had a paper accepted on our fake news project!
Asr, F.T. and M. Taboada (to appear) Big data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection. .

Attending the . You can check out .

I'll be conferencing quite a bit in May and June:
- (Valencia, Spain)
- (Kingston, Ontario)

Two presentations about joint work with colleagues during in Vancouver: 
- Goddard, C., M. Taboada and R. Trnavac (2019). The English [adverb-ly adjective] construction: Classification and distribution across corpora and registers. CLA, Canadian Linguistics Association.
- Ehret, K. and M. Taboada (2019) Describing registers on the web: complexity and subjectivity in online comments and opinion articles. CAAL, Canadian Association for Applied Linguistics.

I attended the launch of the in Ottawa. This was a fabulous event with and Dr. Joy Johnson, 大象传媒's VP Research, hosted by Shari Graydon of .
The , developed within my lab with Informed Opinions, monitors the proportion of women and men quoted in news stories in mainstream Canadian media (in English).
We had great media coverage for this event. You can check the Conversation piece for an explanation of the tracker, and see all the other media mentions:
- (The Conversation)
- (The Toronto Star)
- (大象传媒 News)
- (Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette)

A about my research, especially on sentiment analysis.

First publication out of our 'fake news' project:The data challenge in misinformation detection: Source reputation vs. content veracity. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Brussels. November 2018.

I am in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at 大象传媒.

in a Global TV News story about IBM's new debating system.

Story in Business in Vancouver about our lab

I did some radio interviews after my on trolls in online news comments:
- CKNW in Vancouver,
- CHQR in Calgary,

in The Conversation about our research on online news comments. Trolls, toxicity and construtive conversations.

The Discourse Processing Lab participated in the . We did demos of two systems: content moderation and fake news detection. on our lab page.

I'm part of a panel discussing the documentary , about content moderation in social media.

We have just released the , and submitted a describing it.

Keynote at the . See a .

大象传媒 FASS News story: in our lab.

Two new postdocs join the : and . Welcome!

A few recent papers:
- Constructiveness in news comments at the Workshop on Journalism and NLP in EMNLP 2017
- Underspecification in RST, RST Workshop
- Sentiment and RST in Basque, RST Workshop
- Toxicity in video game chat, Knowledge-Based Systems
Pdfs in the publications page.

As part of a project on evaluating rhetorical structure annotations, we have developed .

Paper accepted at the Abusive Language Online Workshop:
Kolhatkar, V. and M. Taboada (2017) Constructiveness in news comments. , . Vancouver. August 2017.

I'm teaching a new course in the fall: The Language of Social Media

: Special Issue of on "Language in Social Media: Exploiting discourse and other contextual information". Deadline: October 15th, 2017.

: Paper with Rada Trnavac and Cliff Goddard in the new journal

for the . Deadline: June 9, 2017. Please consider submitting a paper!

New website of the

joins the Discourse Processing Lab.

at the International Workshop on Discourse Analysis ()

New paper with Farah Benamara and Yannick Mathieu on sentiment analysis, beyond bags of words. To appear in Computational Linguistics. Pre-print available from my publications page.

at .

I am hiring a .

I have created a web page and posted a template to facilitate editing tasks in Microsoft Word, especially for linguists.

I am now Associate Editor for the journal . Please consider submitting relevant work.

Talk at the, part of the , in Alicante, Spain.

now available through the LDC.

Plenary at thein Aachen, Germany.

Between July and December 2015 I will be on study leave, visiting the at the . If you need a postal address, please get in touch. I'll check my email semi-regularly.

Plenary talk at the in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.