Â鶹ÊÓƵ

Maite Taboada

Distinguished Â鶹ÊÓƵProfessor,
Director,

Robert C. Brown (RCB) Building 8109
8888 University Drive

Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada

My name is pronounced like this and transcribed like this:
['ma̯i.te ta.βo'a.ða]     /'mai.te ta.bo'a.da/

Full CV

I am Distinguished Â鶹ÊÓƵProfessor in the at , where I direct the .
I am a Fellow of the and a Corresponding Member of the in Spain.
At SFU, I am also an Associate Member of the and the . I am a member of the and the .

I am a linguist working at the intersection of discourse analysis and computational linguistics.  In discourse analysis, I study the mechanisms for coherence in discourse. In computational linguistics, I develop methods and algorithms to process and exploit discourse structure in different applications, such as discourse parsing or sentiment analysis.  My research is interdisciplinary, at the boundary between theoretical and applied fields, between the social sciences and engineering.

Please note: I will not be taking new students or postdocs for the 2027-28 academic year.

Current and recent projects:

  • Figurative language in toxic and abusive comments online. We are at the early stages of this project:
    • Rynearson, A., R. Hashemi, V. Vekić Chen and M. Taboada (2025) A three-tier approach to comprehensive metaphor annotation. . Southfield, MI, United States.
    • Hashemi, R., A. Rynearson, V. Vekić Chen and M. Taboada (2025) Metaphor and evaluation: The role of figurative language in negative opinion. . Montréal.
  • Online news comments - This is a corpus and computational project.
    • Corpus: . Ca. 10,000 editorials and 630,000 comments posted on the site of The Globe and Mail. Publicly available.
    • Computational work: a , identifying constructive comments -- those that contribute to the conversation, creating civil dialogue.
    • Kolhatkar, V., H. Wu, L. Cavasso, E. Francis, K. Shukla and M. Taboada (2020) . Corpus Pragmatics 4: 155–190.
    • Kolhatkar, V., N. Thain, J. Sorensen, L. Dixon and M. Taboada (2023) . First Monday 28(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i4.13163
  • Detecting fake news and misinformation. Outputs include:
    • , a dataset of fact-checked news articles.
    • A .
    • Asr, F. T. and M. Taboada (2019) . . January-June 2019: 1-14.
  • The , developed within our lab and in collaboration with , monitors the proportion of women and men quoted in news stories in mainstream Canadian media in English. analyzes French-language media in Canada. The research behind these systems is described in:
    • Soumah, V-G., P. Rao, P. Eibl and M. Taboada (2023). Proceedings of the 36th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Montréal. Jun 2023.
    • Rao, P. and M. Taboada (2021) . Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence – Language and Computation 4(82). doi: 10.3389/frai.2021.664737.
    • Asr, F.T., M. Mazraeh, A. Lopes, V. Gautam, J. Gonzales, P. Rao and M. Taboada (2021) . PLoS ONE 16(1):  e0245533.

More information on these projects is available from the site of the . You can also check a full curriculum vitae (in pdf), or consult my research, teaching and publications pages. The lab also has a .