Modeling and Visualization of Topics and in on-line Asynchronous Conversations

Time: 11:00 am
Location: Meeting Room Ofek, Polo Scientifico e Tecnologico "Fabio Ferrari" (Building Povo 1), via Sommarive 5 - Povo, Trento

Speaker: 
Giuseppe Carenini, Associate Professor, UBC (University of British Columbia).

Abstract: 
Due to the Internet revolution, human conversational data - in written forms - are accumulating at a phenomenal rate, as more and more people engage  in email exchanges, blogging, texting and other social media activities. In this talk, we will present automatic methods for analyzing conversational text and for visualizing the extracted information. Our focus will be on novel techniques to detect and visualize the topics and opinions covered in the conversation. In our work, we compare graph-based methods and probabilistic graphical models for mining information; and we apply a human centered design approach for visualizing the extracted info.

About the Speaker: 
Giuseppe Carenini is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (BC, Canada).  He has  broad interdisciplinary interests. His work on natural language processing and information visualization to support decision making has been published in over 100 peer-reviewed papers (including best paper at UMAP-14 and ACM-TiiS-14) .
Dr. Carenini was the area chair for “Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Text Classification” of ACL 2009, the area chair for “Summarization and Generation” of NAACL 2012, and the Program co-Chair for IUI 2015. He has also co-edited an ACM-TIST Special Issue on “Intelligent Visual Interfaces for Text Analysis”. In 2011, he published a co-authored book on “Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations”. In his work, Dr. Carenini has also extensively collaborated with industrial partners, including Microsoft and IBM.
Giuseppe Carenini was awarded a Google Research Award and an IBM CASCON Best Exhibit Award in 2007 and 2010 respectively.

Contact person regarding this Talk: Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi, riccardi [at] disi.unitn.it