Creative Natural Language Processing

Dealing with creative language and in particular with affective, persuasive and even humorous language has often been considered outside the scope of computational linguistics. Nonetheless it is possible to exploit current NLP techniques starting some explorations about it. We briefly review some computational experiences about these typical creative genres. Then we will talk about the exploitation of some extra-linguistic features: for example music and lyrics in emotion detection, and an audience-reaction tagged corpus of political speeches for the analysis of persuasive language. As further examples of practical applications, we will present a system for automatized memory techniques for vocabulary acquisition in a second language, and an application for automatizing creative naming (branding). Short Biography Carlo Strapparava is a senior researcher at FBK-irst (Fondazione Bruno Kessler Istituto per la ricerca scientifica e Tecnologica) in the Human Language Technologies Unit. His research activity covers artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent interfaces, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, knowledge-based systems, user models, adaptive hypermedia, lexical knowledge bases, word-sense disambiguation, affective computing and computational humour. He is the author of over 150 papers, published in scientific journals, book chapters and in conference proceedings. He also played a key role in the definition and the development of many projects funded by European research programmes. He regularly serves in the program committees of the major NLP conferences (ACL, EMNLP, etc.). 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.