Computational exercises of creative language

Abstract:
Dealing with creative language and in particular with affective, persuasive and even humorous language has often been considered outside the scope of computational linguistics, and, in general, a challenge for AI systems. Nonetheless, it is possible to exploit current NLP techniques to address some founding aspects of these linguistic phenomena. We briefly review some computational experiences about these typical creative genres.

Short Bio:
Carlo Strapparava is a senior researcher at FBK-irst (Fondazione Bruno Kessler – Istituto per la ricerca scientifica e Tecnologica) in the Human-Language-Technologies NLP Unit. His research activity covers artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent interfaces, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, knowledge-based systems, user models, lexical knowledge bases, word sense disambiguation, affective computing and computational humour. He is the author of over 220 papers, published in scientific journals, book chapters and in conference proceedings. He has the Italian scientific habilitation for full professor in informatics and engineering. He regularly serves in the program committees of the major NLP conferences. He was executive board member of SIGLEX, a Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2007-2010), Senseval (Evaluation Exercises for the Semantic Analysis of Text) organisation committee (2005-2010). On June 2011, he was awarded with a Google Research Award on Natural Language Processing, specifically on the computational treatment of creative language.