Maite Taboada

Professor, Department of Linguistics
Director, Discourse Processing Lab
Associate Member, School of Computing Science

Robert C. Brown (RCB) Building 8109
8888 University Drive
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada

My name is pronounced like this and transcribed like this:
['ma̯ite taβo'aða] /'maite tabo'ada/

I am Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. At SFU, I am also an Associate Member of the Cognitive Science Program and the School of Computing Science. I direct the Discourse Processing Lab.

I am a linguist working at the intersection of discourse analysis and computational linguistics. In discourse analysis, I study the mechanisms for coherence in discourse, focusing on how links across sentences produce the impression of coherence in text and speech. My discourse research is corpus-based and data-driven, and my contributions involve the creation of (annotated) datasets or corpora for analysis. In computational linguistics, I develop methods and algorithms to process and exploit discourse structure in different applications. In recent years, I have focused on two specific areas: discourse or rhetorical relations and sentiment analysis. This research is interdisciplinary, at the boundary between theoretical and applied fields, between the social sciences and engineering.

Current projects:

A project examining the nature of online news comments, those posted in response to a news article and, more specifically, to an opinion article. This is a corpus and computational project.
- Corpus: SOCC, the SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus. Ca. 10,000 editorials and 630,000 comments posted on the site of The Globe and Mail. Publicly available.
- Computational work: a system to moderate comments, identifying constructive comments -- those that contribute to the conversation, creating civil dialogue.
A project on detecting fake news and misinformation. Work in progress includes:
- MisInfoText, a dataset of fact-checked news articles.
- A system to detect fake news online.
The Gender Gap Tracker, developed within our lab and in collaboration with Informed Opinions, monitors the proportion of women and men quoted in news stories in mainstream Canadian media (in English).

More information on these projects is available from the site of the Discourse Processing Lab. You can also check a full curriculum vitae (in pdf), or consult my research, teaching and publications pages. The lab also has a GitHub page.