Dirk Hovy
Associate Professor

Biography
Dirk Hovy is an Associate Professor at Università Bocconi where he works on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. Previously, he was faculty and postdoc in Copenhagen, he is also the scientific director of BIDSA’s Data and Marketing Insights (DMI) research unit, and head of the MilaNLP lab. He organized a conference (EMNLP 2017) and various workshops on abusive language, ethics in NLP, and computational social science. work in natural language processing and computational social science, and he is interested in modeling what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He also works on ethics and fairness in NLP and AI. Technique-wise, he is interested in transfer learning, multitask learning, reinforcement learning and adversarial learning. He received a 2020 ERC Starting Grant to explore the effect of sociodemographic variables on NLP models, and to integrate the two. He got a PhD in Natural Language Processing, from USC, and a Master's in sociolinguistics in Germany.
Recent Publications
- 2024
Beyond the Stats: Realities, Perception, and Social Media Discourse on Poverty
BOSE, P., L. LUPO, M. HABIBI, D. HOVY, C. , R. SCHWARZ, "Beyond the Stats: Realities, Perception, and Social Media Discourse on Poverty", American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, 2024, vol. 114, pp. 690-694 - 2023
Gender and Age Bias in Commercial Machine Translation
BIANCHI, F., T. FORNACIARI, D. HOVY, D. NOZZA, "Gender and Age Bias in Commercial Machine Translation" in Towards Responsible Machine Translation., Helena Moniz, Carla Parra Escartín (Eds.), Springer International Publishing, pp. 159-184, 2023 - 2022
Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists: Prediction and Classification
HOVY, D. - "Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists: Prediction and Classification" - 2022, Cambridge University Press - 2021
Wordify: A Tool for Discovering and Differentiating Consumer Vocabularies
HOVY, D., S. MELUMAD, J. J. INMAN, "Wordify: A Tool for Discovering and Differentiating Consumer Vocabularies", Journal of Consumer Research, 2021, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 394-414 - 2020
Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists: Discovery and Exploration
HOVY, D. - "Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists: Discovery and Exploration" - 2020, Cambridge University Press - 2019
Lörres, Möppes, and the Swiss. (Re)Discovering regional patterns in anonymous social media data
PURSCHKE, C., D. HOVY, "Lörres, Möppes, and the Swiss. (Re)Discovering regional patterns in anonymous social media data", Journal of Linguistic Geography, 2019, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 113-134
Grants & Honors
Bocconi Teaching Award per l'anno accademico 2023-2024 - “Innovation in Teaching”, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, 2025
Teaching Award - PhD School, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, 2022
ERC Starting Grant INTEGRATOR, PI (1.5M EUR), 2020

