ERC Starting grant - GA 101116095 — PERSONAE

Principal Investigator: Debora Nozza

Abstract: 

Each person has their own interests and preferences based on their cultural background personal experience and routine. These factors impact the individual’s views of what makes them happy angry or depressed over time. Language technologies (LTs) have the ability to consider each individual bias. However current research presumes there is only one static view of subjectivity removing human representation and universal access to LTs. Language-based AI such as virtual assistants and grammar checkers are already simplifying our lives on a daily basis. But despite significant scientific advances and the general public's positive attitude toward AI most LT applications are not available to people in their daily lives limiting LT potential positive impact. Ironically this representation gap becomes more pronounced for subjective tasks i.e. tasks that can have many different right answers depending on individual subjective perception such as abusive language detection sentiment and emotion analysis. My project will make language technology accessible and valuable to everyone. I will revolutionize research in subjective tasks by developing a new field called personal NLP. This new research area will explore subjective tasks from the perspective of the individual yielding new data sets tasks and algorithms.