PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Milan Tofiloski

Milan Tofiloski is a natural-language processing researcher whose work spans discourse segmentation, sentiment analysis, and text coherence. In 2009, he coauthored papers on discourse segmentation and English-to-Spanish sentiment analysis, and presented an M.Sc. thesis at Simon Fraser University on measuring text coherence with Centering Theory. His 2011 sentiment-analysis paper introduced SO-CAL and earned the Association for Computational Linguistics’ 2021 Test-of-Time Paper Award; in 2014, he and collaborators presented work on discourse zones in medical encounters. As of October 2026, he is an instructor in the School of Computing at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Now at
University of the Fraser Valley

Timeline

  1. 2009

    Two NLP conference papers

    In 2009, he coauthors “A Syntactic and Lexical-Based Discourse Segmenter” and “Cross-Linguistic Sentiment Analysis: From English to Spanish” with Julian Brooke and Maite Taboada.

  2. 2009–2010

    Centering theory and coherence

    He presents an M.Sc. thesis at Simon Fraser University in 2009 that extends Centering Theory to track entities and measure text coherence. At the 2010 Northwest Regional NLP Workshop, he coauthors “Extending Centering Theory for the Measure of Coherence” with Fred Popowich and Maite Taboada.

  3. 2011

    SO-CAL for sentiment analysis

    He coauthors “Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis” with Maite Taboada, Julian Brooke, Kimberly Voll and Manfred Stede in 2011. The paper presents SO-CAL, the Semantic Orientation CALculator, and argues for its superiority over alternative methods for sentiment analysis.

  4. May 2014

    Discourse zones in medical encounters

    At the 2014 ISA-10 workshop, he, Fred Popowich and Evan Zhang present “Annotating Discourse Zones in Medical Encounters.”

  5. 2021

    An ACL Test-of-Time Award

    He shares the Association for Computational Linguistics’ 2021 Test-of-Time Paper Award with Maite Taboada, Julian Brooke, Kimberly Voll and Manfred Stede for “Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis.”

  6. As of October 2026

    Instructor at UFV

    As of October 2026, he is an instructor in the School of Computing at the University of the Fraser Valley’s Abbotsford campus.

Career

  1. NowUniversity of the Fraser ValleyInstructor

Education

  1. 2009Simon Fraser UniversityM.Sc.

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Simon Fraser University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Simon Fraser University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Simon Fraser University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Simon Fraser University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Milan Tofiloski yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. A Syntactic and Lexical-Based Discourse Segmenter - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Cross-Linguistic Sentiment Analysis: From English to Spanish - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. News - SFU Natural Language Laboratory natlang.cs.sfu.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. M.Sc. Thesis Defence and Seminar - Milan Tofiloski - SFU Natural Language Laboratory natlang.cs.sfu.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. NW-NLP 2010: Call for Submissions and Participation depts.washington.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Professor Maite Taboada and team win Test-of-Time Award sfu.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. ISA-10: Tenth Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation sigsem.uvt.nl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. ACL Test-of-Time Papers Award Recipients aclweb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. School of Computing > Meet our faculty & staff | UFV.ca ufv.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.