Maite Taboada

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 unique in that it is at the boundary between theoretical and applied fields, between the social sciences and engineering.

My current project examines the nature of online news comments, those posted in response to a news article and, more specifically, to an opinion article. More information on this project is available from the site of the Discourse Processing Lab.

For further details, you can check a full curriculum vitae (in pdf), or consult my research, teaching and publications pages. The lab also has a GitHub page.