Dirk Hovy

I am an associate professor of Computer Science in the department of marketing at Bocconi University and director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit at the Bocconi Center for Data Science and Analytics. I did my PhD at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, working as research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute.

I work in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence. My research focuses on computational social science. I am interested in what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. For example integrating sociolinguistic knowledge into NLP models, and, conversely, using large-scale statistical models of the interaction between people’s socio-demographic profile and their language use (see here or here). You can watch a brief non-technical explanation here. I was recently awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate these issues in my project INTEGRATOR.

I am also interested in ethics in NLP and demographic biases.

My book about text analysis with Python for social scientists (and everyone else interested) is online.

News coverage of my work has been published (among others) by Washington Post, CNN, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Die Welt, Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ), Venture Beat, AdWeek, Bloomberg, Fox News, and Spektrum der Wissenschaft.

EDUCATION

• 2008—2013 PhD student at the University of Southern California
• 2007—2008 Study of computational linguistics at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
• 2001—2006 Study of German and English linguistics as well as Linguistic Engineering at the University of Marburg
• 2003 Semester abroad at University of Antwerp, Belgium
• 2000 Abitur (final secondary school examinations) at Lichtenbergschule Darmstadt