We've heard it time and time again: Don't read the comments. Except today, WWEST manager Danniele speaks with Dr. Maite Taboada, a professor in linguistics at Simon Fraser University, who actually takes time out of her day to read and study those very comments online. In this episode you'll hear all about her work with Informed Opinions on the Gender Gap Tracker, a tool that tracks in real time the number of women and men quoted in major news platforms, plus Maite's journey that took her to computational linguistics at SFU.

Guest: Maite Taboada (website)

Maite Taboada is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. Her research combines discourse analysis and computational linguistics, with an emphasis on discourse relations and sentiment analysis. Maite’s current work focuses on the analysis of online comments, drawing insights from corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and big data. Other projects include a study of fake news online and the Gender Gap Tracker, a tool that tracks in real time the number of women and men quoted in major news platforms in Canada. Maite is the director of the Discourse Processing Lab at SFU.

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For a full transcription of this episode, click here.

Relevant Links:

• Discourse Processing Lab
  
• Gender Gap Tracker
• Informed Opinions
• Maite's Publications
  

Hosted by: Danniele Livengood (@livengood)
Theme Music: “Positive and Fun” by Scott Holmes
Produced by: Vanessa Hennessey