Data Science Seminar

Identifying Affective Events and the Reasons for their Polarity

Ellen Riloff

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Identifying Affective Events and the Reasons for their Polarity

When Friday, October 2, 2020, 11:50 AM – 1:10 PM (MT)

Abstract

Recognizing affective states is essential for narrative text understanding and for applications such as conversational dialogue, summarization, and sarcasm recognition. Many tools have been developed to recognize explicit expressions of sentiment, but affective states can also be inferred from events. This talk will focus on “affective events”, which are generally desirable or undesirable experiences that implicitly suggest an affective state for the experiencer. For example, buying a home is usually desirable and associated with a positive affective state, but being laid off is undesirable and associated with a negative state. First, we will describe a weakly supervised learning method to induce affective events from a text corpus by optimizing for semantic consistency. Second, we aim to characterize affective events based on Human Needs Categories, which often explain people’s motivations, goals, and desires. We will present a co-training model for Human Needs categorization that uses an event expression classifier and an event context classifier to learn from both labeled and unlabeled texts.

Speaker

Ellen Riloff

Utah Computer Science

cs.utah.edu

Ellen Riloff is a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Her primary research area is natural language processing, with an emphasis on information extraction, affective text analysis, semantic class induction, and bootstrapping methods that learn from unannotated texts. Prof. Riloff has served as the General Chair for the EMNLP 2018 conference, Program Co-Chair for the NAACL HLT 2012 and CoNLL 2004 conferences, on the NAACL Executive Board for 2004-2005 and 2017-2018, the Computational Linguistics Editorial Board, and the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) Editorial Board. In 2018, Prof. Riloff was named a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Tags: machine learning natural language processing

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