Saif M. Mohammad, Principal Research Scientist at the National Research Council Canada, was invited by the project as a keynote speaker at the First Valence Asymmetries Conference, and gave an additional talk at the Pre-conference Workshop, on 18th of March, in the Sala Nau at UPF Poblenou.

His talk, entitled "Mapping the Emotional and Social Dimensions of Language: The Next Generation of NRC Lexicons", featured as a special session of the Valence Asymmetries seminar and the COLT seminar, attracted over 40 attendeed and was received with great enthusiasm. 

Dr. Mohammad is widely known for the creation of the NRC Emotion Lexicon (2010) and the NRC Valence, Arousal, and Dominance Lexicon (2018), databases that are widely used in research, commerce, journalism, human-computer interaction, arts, and health studies. Building on that work, he presented in this talk new even larger versions of these lexicons (that also include multiword expressions) and new lexicons covering the dimensions of anxiety (WorryWords), warmth, competence, and moral foundations. He discussed key ideas and design decisions that impact the quality and usefulness of the resources. These lexicons enable researchers to investigate how emotions, anxiety, morality, and social perceptions are expressed in language; the extent of asymmetries of valence in the vocabulary of these dimensions; and how these patterns vary across cultures, age, genders, socio-economic status, etc.