PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Paul Hoffmann

Paul Hoffmann is a natural language processing researcher who co-authored a paper on contextual polarity in phrase-level sentiment analysis. With Theresa Wilson and Janyce Wiebe, he published the 2005 HLT-EMNLP paper and the 2009 Computational Linguistics article Recognizing Contextual Polarity, and he co-authored the 2005 OpinionFinder demonstration paper on subjectivity analysis. The ACL gave the 2009 article its Test-of-Time Award in 2019, citing its analysis of features that explain and predict contextual meaning. He is a master's alumnus of the Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Timeline

  1. 2005

    A contextual polarity paper

    In 2005, he co-authors Recognizing Contextual Polarity in Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis with Theresa Wilson and Janyce Wiebe for the joint Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

  2. 2005

    The OpinionFinder demonstration

    He is one of nine authors, with Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe, Claire Cardie, Ellen Riloff and others, of OpinionFinder: A System for Subjectivity Analysis, published in 2005 in the HLT/EMNLP Interactive Demonstrations proceedings.

  3. 2009

    A Computational Linguistics article

    Wilson, Wiebe and Hoffmann publish Recognizing Contextual Polarity: An Exploration of Features for Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis in Computational Linguistics, volume 35, number 3, in September 2009.

  4. 2019

    The ACL Test-of-Time Award

    The ACL names the 2009 article the 2019 winner of its Test-of-Time Award, shared with Theresa Wilson and Janyce Wiebe. The ACL's motivation says the paper introduced contextual polarity of sentiment terms, including neutral, and analyzed word-level, dependency, sentence-level and topic features.

  5. 2019

    Pitt Intelligent Systems alumnus

    As a master's alumnus of the Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh, he receives the program's congratulations in 2019 on the award, together with PhD alumna Theresa Wilson.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of Pittsburgh. 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.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Pittsburgh. 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.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Pittsburgh. 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.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes University of Pittsburgh. 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.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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  1. Recognizing Contextual Polarity in Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. OpinionFinder: A System for Subjectivity Analysis - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Recognizing Contextual Polarity: An Exploration of Features for Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. ACL Test-of-Time Papers Award Recipients - Admin Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Announcement of the 2019 ACL Test-of-Time Awards (ToT) | ACL Member Portal aclweb.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. ISP Alumni and ISP Faculty Member Receive ACL Test-of-Time Award | Intelligent Systems Program isp.pitt.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.