Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is pleased to welcome Linguistics’ Dr. Maite Taboada to the FASS Dean’s Office as Associate Dean of Research through the Fall 2018 term while Dr. Lisa Shapiro is away on study leave.

Dr. Taboada joined the Department of Linguistics at SFU in 2001 with a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and an MSc in Computational Linguistics from Carnegie Mellon University.  

Working in the areas of discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, and computational linguistics, Taboada’s research is focused on the analysis of online comments, combining insights from corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and big data.

Taboada is the director of the Discourse Processing Lab and Associate Member in both the School of Computing Science and the Cognitive Science Program. She is also the 2017 recipient of the FASS Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence and as her website and CV can attest, Taboada has published widely in her field and steadily contributed both time and service to her international research community and to the SFU community generally. Her current research is around two “hot” topics in online discourse: how to moderate online comments, and how to automatically detect fake news. Together with postdoctoral fellow Fatemeh Torabi Asr, she will be presenting on the latter topic on the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and Verification in Brussels in November.

When asked what she is most looking forward to in taking on this new administrative role, Taboada says “I am very excited about learning more about the diverse research within FASS. We have a wide range of research areas, approaches, and methodologies, and I look forward to supporting researchers so that they can continue to do what they already do so well.”