Flor Plaza

Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the MilaNLP group at Bocconi University. With a primary focus on leveraging NLP for social good, her research interests span across areas such as hate speech detection, emotion analysis, and early risk prediction on the Web.
In January 2023 she completed her Ph.D., where she made significant contributions to hate speech detection. She created different resources including corpora and lexicons, as well as developed computational systems that benefit from different linguistic phenomena to detect offensive language more accurately.
Notably, she has actively contributed to the academic community by co-organizing the EmoEvalEs and MeOffendES shared tasks at the IberLEF 2021 event, which focused on emotion detection and offensive language identification. She has also co-organized the 36th, 37th, and 39th editions of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing Conference (SEPLN).

Resume

News

July 2023 – At ACL 2023 in Toronto, I’m presenting the co-authored WOAH paper

June 2023 – Accepted at WOAH. Respectful or Toxic? Using Zero-Shot Learning with Language Models to Detect Hate Speech

February 2023 – I’m now a postdoctoral researcher at Dirk Hovy’s MilaNLP Lab

January 2023 – I defended my PhD at the SINAI research group (University of Jaén) supervised by Maite Martin and L. Alfonso Ureña

Education

February 2023 - Present
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
MilaNLP, Bocconi University, 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)

Achievements

DETOXIS Shared Task Winner
Ranked 1st among 31 teams in the DETOXIS Shared Task on toxicity detection in Spanish (IberLEF 2021, SEPLN)
EXIST Shared Task Winner
Ranked 2nd among 72 submitted systems in the EXIST Shared Task on sexism identification in social networks (IberLEF 2022, SEPLN)
RAE Hackathon Winner
First prize in the “Neologisms and technical terms in the field of energy and environmental energy and environment” Hackathon with the POEMA project. The Royal Spanish Academy and the Endesa Foundation.
Twitter Thread Competition Winner
Winner in the general category of the “II Edition of the Contest Your Doctoral Thesis in a Twitter Thread. HiloTesis”. Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Best Introductory Research Work
Work entitled "Minería de emociones en texto en español" (Emotion mining in Spanish text). V Ada Lovelace Award. University of Jaén.
Language Technology Hackathon Winner (MWC)
The second prize of the II Hackathon of Language Technologies, in the "General Corpus" modality, with the prototype "Monitor of geographical dispersion of diseases'. This award is part of the '4 Years From Now", of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona.

Get in Touch

flor.plaza[at]unibocconi.it