Oren Tsur's homepage

Oren Tsur
{my first name}@cs huji ac il

Short Bio

I'm currently a PhD. canditate in the Computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
I'm working with Prof. Ari Rappoport mainly on Content Analysis of Social Networks. I research various aspects of user generated content, such as Amazon product reviews and Twitter tweets, trying to predict the helpfulness/quality of reviews, predict the popularity of memes and extract indirect emotions such as sarcasm to allow more accurate sentiment analysis. In my research, I'm interested in the psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects thus my main focus is content and language rather than the topology of the social graph.

I was also working on computational aspects of natural language semantics and its application to non-native speakers and on Language modelling of product reviews , books in particular.

I was a program committee member in ICWSM 2010, ICWSM 2011 and NAACL 2012. I reviewd papers for a number of ACL conferences and for Information Processing & Management (Elsevier).

I completed undergraduate studies at the CS department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and my MSc. (cum laude) at the Institute for Logic Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amstardam (UvA), working with Prof. Dr. Maarten de Rijke and Dr. Khalil Sima'an .

In the industry I was working as a SW engineer at the Intel corp. Jerusalem, doing R&D in the ICGJ center, as a product manager at NST (a VoIP startup company) and as an intern at Yahoo! Research.

My 15 minutes of fame:
Our sarcasm detection algorithm was selected by Time Magazine as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2010 .

Research interests

Keywords: {computational linguistics, natural language processing, NLP, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, language acquisition, social networks, indirect speech}

Publications

[NEW] What's in a Hashtag? Content based Prediction of the Spread of Ideas in Microblogging Communities, Oren Tsur and Ari Rappoport.
Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (WSDM), 2012 (to appear)

Enhanced Sentiment Learning Using Twitter Hashtags and Smileys, Dmitry Davidov*, Oren Tsur* and Ari Rappoport.
[*Both authors equally contributed to this paper]
Proceeding of the 23rd international conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2010

ICWSM - A Great Catchy Name: Semi-Supervised Recognition of Sarcastic Sentences in Product Reviews, Oren Tsur, Dmitry Davidov and Ari Rappoport.
Proceeding of AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media - ICWSM-10, 2010, (talk video) (annotated data)

     Our work on sarcasm detection was chosen number 14 in the 50 best inventions of 2010 by TIME magazine.

      Sample of media interest in our work about sarcasm detection (SASI):
           Science (pdf),     TIME magazine,    BBC (radio interview, mp3),     Gizmodo,    CNET,    Discovery news,    New Scientist

Semi-Supervised Recognition of Sarcastic Sentences in Twitter and Amazon, Dmitry Davidov*, Oren Tsur* and Ari Rappoport.
[*both authors equally contributed]
Proceeding of Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2010, (annotated data)

RevRank: A Fully Unsupervised Algorithm for Selecting the Most Helpful Book Reviews, Oren Tsur and Ari Rappoport.
Proceeding of AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media - ICWSM-09, 2009, (talk video)

Using Classifier Features for Studying the Effect of Native Language on the Choice of Written Second Language Words, Oren Tsur and Ari Rappoport.
Proceedings ACL 2007 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition, 2007

BioGrapher: Biography Questions as a Restricted Domain Question Answering Task), O. Tsur, M. de Rijke, and K. Sima'an.
Proceedings ACL 2004 Workshop on Question Answering in Restricted Domains, 2004

The University of Amsterdam at the TREC 2003 Question Answering Track, V. Jijkoun, G. Mishne, C. Monz, M. de Rijke, S. Schlobach, and O. Tsur.
In: Proceedings TREC 2003, 2004

Addresses Etc

School of Computer Science and Engineering,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Jerusalem 91904, Israel

Email: {my first name}@cs huji ac il
Office: Room 31, Ross Building, Givat Ram Campus
Phone: +972-2-658-5297
Fax: +972-2-658-5439

Teaching

I am/was TA-ing the following courses: Introduction to Computer Science and Java Programming^†‡, Logical Programming^°, Information Retrieval^°, Data Mining^‡.

†: The Hebrew University
‡: The Open University
°: Bar Ilan University

Pics

Using the wonders of sharing services, here are some Picasa albums:

my public Picasa

family