Talk by Sabine Weber

17 April 2025, by DS Group

We would like to announce that Sabine Weber is giving a talk in our group. 

Title: No Text Without Context - Perspectivist Approaches to Emotion Analysis 

When: Thursday, 17.04.2025

Abstract: Humans most often encounter text surrounded by a plethora of meta-textual clues that shape the way the text is interpreted. It makes a difference whether we read a sentence as message from a friend, as the headline of a news story or as a part of a science-fiction novel. Additionally, properties of the reader play a role. Whether we find a statement funny, offensive or sad depends on a variety of factors, from our age and gender to more demographically intangible properties like the movies we enjoyed growing up or what kind of people we are friends with. The formalization of NLP tasks mostly ignores these factors, focusing on text alone. In this talk I will present ongoing work on combining meta-textual and textual information. I will shine light on the question whether knowing demographic information about the author helps people to annotate emotion in ambiguous text. I will also talk about my work on a corpus for personalization across the tasks of emotion analysis, humor detection and aggression detection.

Who: Sabine Weber started out as a linguist, but has been a computer scientist for quite a while now. They did their PhD at the University of Edinburgh working on multilingual entailment detection and domain adaptation with Mark Steedman and Mirella Lapata. Now they are a postdoc at the Fundamentals of NLP Lab at the University of Bamberg, doing research on personalization, perspectivism and queer NLP.