Flor Plaza

Hello 👋! I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Dirk Hovy‘s MilaNLP lab at Bocconi University. My research interests mainly focus on the interplay between language, computation, and society, primarily through the lens of emotions and harmful language —endeavors aligned with the vision of Natural Language Processing for social good. I am passionate about actively using my expertise and the potential of NLP to drive a positive impact on society.
In January 2023 I obtained my Ph.D., awarded with the highest honors (summa cum laude), from the SINAI lab at the University of Jaén (Spain) where I made significant contributions to the detection of hate speech and the identification of emotions, especially in Spanish.
Notably, I have actively contributed to the academic community by co-organizing The 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms at NAACL 2024, the EmoEvalEs, MeOffendES and the MentalRiskES shared tasks at the IberLEF 2021 and 2023 events. I have also co-organized the 36th, 37th, and 39th editions of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing Conference (SEPLN). Currently, I am co-organizing the Tutorial on countering hateful and offensive speech online at EMNLP 2024.

News

October 2024 - I’m going to attend the New Perspectives on Bias and Discrimination in Language Technology Workshop to present our paper on gendered emotions in LLMs.

September 2024 - New paper accepted to EMNLP 2024. Divine LLaMAs. Bias, Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Emotion Representation of Religion in Large Language Models.

September 2024 - I have received the Best PhD thesis award by the Spanish Conference on Natural Language Processing (SEPLN).

July 2024 - I have been honored with the prestigious Young Researcher in Computer Science national award by SCIE and BBVA Foundation in Spain.

June 2024 - I am at NAACL 2024 in Mexico City as co-organizer of WOAH.

May 2024 - I am at LREC-COLING presenting two papers!
(1) Main Conference. Emotion Analysis in NLP. Trends, Gaps and Roadmap for Future Directions.
(2) 3rd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP. Wisdom of Instruction-Tuned Language Model Crowds. Exploring Model Label Variation

May 2024 - New paper accepted to ACL 2024. Angry Men, Sad Women. Large Language Models Reflect Gendered Stereotypes in Emotion Attribution

Education

February 2023 - Present
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
MilaNLP, Bocconi University, Italy
May 2022 - July 2022
Visiting PHD Student
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
May 2021 - July 2021
Visiting PHD Student
University of Stuttgart
April 2019 - June 2019
Visiting PHD Student
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
2018 - January 2023
PhD in Computer Science
SINAI, University of Jaén, Spain

PhD Thesis

  • Detecting offensive language by combining multiple linguistic phenomena
2016 - 2018
Master in Computer Science
University of Jaén, Spain

Master Thesis

  • Análisis computacional de emociones en las redes sociales (Computational analysis of emotions on social media)
2012 - 2016
Bachelor in Computer Science
University of Jaén, Spain

Bachelor Thesis

  • Análisis de opiniones de pacientes en la Web 2.0 (Analysis of patient opinions on Web 2.0)

Get in Touch

flor.plaza[at]unibocconi.it