Jason Kessler

  Biography:
Current Academic Activities:
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. In 2012 I expect to graduate. My research focuses on applying statistical natural language processing techniques for sentiment analysis. Specifically, I explore the compositional way that evaluations is expressed toward discourse entities, a topic my collaborators and I call "structural sentiment." My adviser, Prof. Michael Gasser, heads the HLTDI resarch group where I frequently give talks. You can also find me at the CL Lunch and NaN meetings.
Current Industrial Activities:
Data scientist at PlaceIQ in New York, NY. More about PlaceIQ here, here, and most recently here.
Adviser to Votizen, Mountain View, CA.
Summer of 2009:
I interned at the Palo Alto Research Center (formally Xerox PARC). I worked with Dr. Ji Fang and Dr. Jessica Staddon on a project in sentiment analysis as a member of the Computing Sciences Lab.
2008-2010:
I was a scientist at J.D. Power and Associates, Boulder, CO. Working with Dr. Nicolas Nicolov, I helped to guide the construction of a corpus for structural sentiment analysis and researched ways of automatically annotating structural sentiment relations. Please see our ICWSM 2009 and 2010 papers for details on part of this effort.
2001-2005:
In 2005, I received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh. While an undergrad, I worked with Prof. Janyce Wiebe on OpinionFinder, a publicly available system for sentence and expression-level subjectivity analysis.
Peer-Reviewed Publications:
Unpublished Papers:
Data and software
  • You may request the JDPA Sentiment Corpus (used in Kessler and Nicolov [2009] and Kessler et al. [2010]) through the official website.
  • The lexicon of terms and multi-word units organized by part-of-speech, veridicality (including facticity) can be found here. These terms, when selected for by syntactic templates outlined in the ICWSM 2008 paper can be used to accurately predict the veridicity of an embeded, finite clause. This an important step in recognizing textual entailment and paraphrase.
Service: Contact:
  • E-mail: here
  • Mailing address:
    Computer Science Department
    Lindley Hall, Room 215
    Indiana University
    150 S. Woodlawn Ave.
    Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Distractions:
  • The Dylan Pool: predict the songs Bob Dylan will play on his next tour and win a prize.
  • A map of Rome showing the location of each Borromini building in the city.
  • Richard Serra on Charlie Rose (14 December 2001)
  • The Linguist's Search Engine.
  • The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks
  • SIL's glossary of linguistic terms.
  • A list of Wikipedia edits from notable organizations
  • My Erdös number is less than or equal to 5 (via Claire Cardie ~ Raymond J. Mooney ~ Wolfgang Maass ~ Andras Hajnal)
  • None of my previous work focused on the development and evaluation of tools and techniques for long-term digital preservation. If you're interested in current related work in this area at IU, a good place to start is here.
This is a personal web site, produced on my own time and solely reflecting my personal opinions. Statements on this site do not represent the views or policies of my employer, past or present, or any other organization with which I may be affiliated.