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anLee

Type of Talk:  UTCS Colloquium/AI

Speaker/Affiliat

ion:  Lillian Lee/Cornell University

Date/Time:  Friday,
February 20, 2009  11:00 a.m.

Location:  ACES 2.402

Host:  Raymond Mooney

Talk Title:  "A Tempest: o

r, On the Flood of Interest in Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and t

he Computational Treatment of Subjective Language"

Talk Abstrac

t:

What do other people think?" has always been an important co

nsideration to most of us when making decisions. Long before the World Wide
Web, we asked our friends who they were planning to vote for and consulte

d Consumer Reports to decide which dishwasher to buy. But the Internet has

(among other things) made it possible to learn about the opinions and exper

iences of those in the vast pool of people that are neither our personal ac

quaintances nor well-known professional critics --- that is, people we hav

e never heard of. Enter sentiment analysis, a flourishing research area de

voted to the computational treatment of subjective and opinion-oriented lan

guage. Sample phenomena to contend with range from sarcasm in blog postings
to the interpretation of political speeches. This talk will cover some of

the motivations, challenges, and approaches in this broad and exciting fi

eld.

Speaker Bio:

Lillian Lee is an Associate Professor of Com

puter Science at Cornell University. Her research interests include natural
language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. She is
the recipient of the inaugural Best Paper Award at HLT-NAACL 2004 (joint w

ith Regina Barzilay), a citation in "Top Picks: Technology Research

Advances of 2004" by Technology Research News (also joint with Regina
Barzilay), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and her group''s

work has been featured in the New York Times.