Dirk Hovy

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.