Info
Foto sezione
Logo Bocconi

DIRK HOVY

DIRK HOVY
Associate Professor
Department of Computing Sciences

Courses a.y. 2023/2024

20597 NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
20879 LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY
40996 COMPUTATIONAL METHODS FOR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

Courses previous a.y.

Biographical note

I am an associate professor working on natural language processing and computational social science. Previously, I was faculty and postdoc in Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC, and a master's in sociolinguistics in Germany.

I am also the scientific director of BIDSA’s Data and Marketing Insights (DMI) research unit, and head of the MilaNLP lab. I have organized a conference (EMNLP 2017) and various workshops (on abusive language, ethics in NLP, and computational social science).

Outside of work, I enjoy cooking, leather-crafting, and picking up heavy object to put them back down. 
 


About

I received a 2020 ERC Starting Grant to explore the effect of sociodemographic variables on NLP models, and to integrate the two. 
 


Research interests

I work in natural language processing and computational social science, and am interested in modeling what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. I also work on ethics and fairness in NLP and AI.

Technique-wise, I am interested in transfer learning, multitask learning, reinforcement learning and adversarial learning.


Working papers




Selected Publications

Hovy, Dirk; Tratz, Stephen; Hovy, Eduard
What's in a preposition? Dimensions of sense disambiguation for an interesting word class
Proceedings of Coling, 2010

Hovy, Dirk; Rahimi, Afshin; Baldwin, Timothy; Brooke, Julian
Visualizing regional language variation across Europe on Twitter
Handbook of the changing world language map, 2019

Purschke, Christoph; Hovy, Dirk
Lörres, Möppes, and the Swiss. (Re)Discovering regional patterns in anonymous social media data
JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY, 2019

Plank, Barbara; Hovy, Dirk
Personality traits on Twitter - or - how to get 1.500 personality tests in a week
6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis WASSA 2015. Workshop Proceedings, 2015

Paun, Silviu; Carpenter, Bob; Chamberlain, Jon; Hovy, Dirk; Kruschwitz, Udo; Poesio, Massimo
Comparing Bayesian models of annotation
TRANSACTIONS OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, 2018

Fornaciari, Tommaso; Hovy, Dirk
Identifying linguistic areas for geolocation
Proceedings of the 2019 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, 2019

Fornaciari, Tommaso; Hovy, Dirk
Geolocation with attention-based multitask learning models
Proceedings of the 2019 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, 2019

Hovy, Dirk; Fornaciari, Tommaso
Increasing in-class similarity by retrofitting embeddings with demographic information
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2018

Nguyen, Hanh; Hovy, Dirk
Hey Siri. Ok Google. Alexa: a topic modeling of user reviews for smart speakers
Proceedings of the 2019 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, 2019

Fornaciari, Tommaso; Hovy, Dirk
Dense node representation for geolocation
Proceedings of the 2019 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, 2019


Garimella, Aparna; Banea, Carmen; Hovy, Dirk; Mihalcea, Rada
Women’s syntactic resilience and men’s grammatical luck: gender-bias in part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019

Waseem, Zeerak; Hovy, Dirk
Hateful symbols or hateful people? Predictive features for hate speech detection on Twitter
The 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop, 2016

Hovy, Dirk; Vaswani, Ashish; Tratz, Stephen; Chiang, David; Hovy, Eduard
Models and training for unsupervised preposition sense disambiguation
Proceedings of ACL, 2011

Hovy, Dirk
The social and the neural network: how to make natural language processing about people again
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media, 2018

Johannsen, Anders; Hovy, Dirk; Alonso, H'Ector Martinez; Plank, Barbara; Sogaard, Anders
More or less supervised supersense tagging of Twitter
Proceedings of the Third Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, 2014

Plank, Barbara; Hovy, Dirk; Sogaard, Anders
Linguistically debatable or just plain wrong?
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2014

Jørgensen, Anna; Hovy, Dirk; Søgaard, Anders
Challenges of studying and processing dialects in social media
ACL 2015 Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text. Proceedings of the Workshop, 2015

Hovy, Dirk; Johannsen, Anders; Søgaard, Anders
User review sites as a resource for large-scale sociolinguistic studies
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, 2015

Hovy, Dirk; Plank, Barbara; Martinez Alonso, Hector; Sogaard, Anders
Mining for unambiguous instances to adapt POS taggers to new domains
Proceedings of NAACL, 2015