Emotion Analysis in Natural Language

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                Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Human Language Technology Center
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Lecture Title:  Emotion Analysis in Natural Language

Speaker:        Dr. Pearl Pu
                Head of HCI Group
                School of Computer and Communication Sciences
                Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)

Topic:          "Human Computer Interaction, Applied Computing"

Date:           Friday, 19 January 2018

Time:           10:30am to 11:30am

Venue:          Room 2463 (via lift 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

What is human emotion? It turns out there are more than 90 definitions.
Among the most recent well-accepted ones, emotion is understood as our
reaction to external and internal events such as a loud noise (external,
surprise), being told we passed the college entrance exam (external, joy),
or a thought that triggered the memory of a bygone love (internal, sad).
We care about emotions because they motivate us to take actions, influence
the quality of our decisions, and enhance our ability to empathize and
communicate.

In this talk, I will describe the various challenges related to
understanding, detecting, and visualizing emotions in large text datasets.
To show you the research methodology we have explored and developed, I
will demonstrate concrete steps and systems for eliciting emotion
annotations from crowd workers, motivating and incentivizing them,
building domain-specific lexicons, processing modifiers such as negations
and intensifiers, and detecting emotions in human dialogs such as those
found in TV series and movies.

The talk will end with some suggestions for future work in this area
including building emotion-aware dialog systems.


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Biography:

Pearl Pu currently leads the HCI Group in the School of Computer and
Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne (EPFL). A native from Shanghai, she moved to the United States
shortly after being admitted to the ZheJiang University. She holds a
Master and Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Pu's research is multi-disciplinary and focuses on issues in the
intersection of human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and
behavioral science. Over her long career, she introduced novel interaction
and interfaces that make it easier for users choose and decide. She is
most credited for inventing example critiquing, a product search method
for large electronic catalogs. She is also well known for designing novel
user study experiments and pioneering user-centered recommender
technology.

She actively participates in the scientific community, serving as general
chair and program co-chair of the ACM International Conference on
Recommender Systems (2008 and 2013), general co-chair of the ACM
International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (2011), program
co-chair of the ACM International Conference on Electronic Commerce
(2009), track co-chair for Behavior Analysis and Personalization at WWW
2012 and 2014, track chair for intelligent user interfaces at the
International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence (2011).

She serves on editorial boards for a number of research publications, such
as the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, the User
Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, the AI Magazine, and previously
IEEE Multimedia. She is a member of the steering committee of the ACM
International Conference on Recommender Systems.

She is recipient of 13 Research Awards from the Swiss National Science
Foundation, 3 Technology Innovation Awards from the Swiss Government, and
a Research Career Award from US National Science Foundation. She also
co-founded three startup companies, for which she received the 2008
CHINICT Award and the 2014 Worldwide Innovation Challenge Award.