News Story

Dr Hassan Saif Receives the 2016 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award

Rachel Coignac-Smith, Tuesday 19 Jul 2016

Dr Hassan Saif has recently received the 2016 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for his Thesis: “Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs”. The award will be presented during the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), which will be held in Kobe, Japan on October 17-21 2016.

The competition this year was very tough with twice the number of submitted applications as last year. Selection of the dissertation was based on the on the originality, significance, and impact of the work on the semantic web research field.

Hassan’s thesis focuses on concept-level sentiment analysis, where he researched several innovative methods of extracting and using the semantics of words along with Natural Language Processing techniques to enhance sentiment analysis performance on social media. Findings of Hassan’s thesis show the significance of using semantic web technology for sentiment analysis in comparison with the statistical state-of-the-art methods.

A significant part of Hassan’s thesis has been previously published at multiple top-tier semantic web journals and conferences. His paper, entitled “Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter”, was one of the first work to introduce the use of semantics for sentiment analysis, and has had strong impact on the research advancement in this field, e.g., the paper has been cited more than 170 times according to Google Scholar.

Hassan has received multiple best paper awards and award nominations which indicates of the positive reception of this body of work by the semantic web community and beyond.

“The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is a non-profit organisation incorporated in Karlsruhe, Germany for the purpose of promoting and exchanging scholarly work in Semantic Web and related fields throughout the world. The association’s activities are selfless; its main objectives do not concern any own economic interests.”