From Feelings to Fingerprints: A Talk at the Department of Communication Colloquium

I’m happy to share that next week, I’ll be giving a talk at the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa. I’ll be presenting some of the methods I’ve developed for analyzing online discourse, focusing on emotional and personal signatures in text, including a technique called Learning via Surprisability (LvS).

Being part of the University’s Ambassadors Program has been an incredible experience, showing me firsthand the value of connecting with researchers across different fields. These interdisciplinary conversations have truly expanded the way I think and work, and I’m excited to continue that exchange during this event.

Title: From Feelings to Fingerprints: New Approaches to Textual Communication

Abstract: In this talk, I will present two novel methods for analyzing human online discourse, each offering a new lens for understanding how people express themselves in written communication.

First, I will show how online reviews — typically viewed as reflections of consumer opinions — can also be mined for the emotional experiences users have while interacting with experience goods, such as films. By aggregating these emotional traces, we can construct emotional signatures for items, offering new insights into collective emotional responses and their role in decision-making and recommendation systems.

Second, I will introduce Learning via Surprisability (LvS), a method for identifying how individuals’ language deviates from domain norms. LvS allows us to extract distinctive personal signatures from text, which can be applied to explainable authorship attribution, the detection of online impersonation, and broader discourse analyses. I will also demonstrate how these tools can be applied to real-world contexts by analyzing the discourse surrounding the Russian attack on Ukraine.

I’m very much looking forward to the discussion and to sharing this work with colleagues and students. Hope to see you there!