Saif Mohammad
Saif Mohammad researches emotions, sentiment and lexical meaning. He coauthored the 2010 crowdsourcing paper on word-emotion associations with Peter Turney. In 2018, he introduced the NRC VAD Lexicon, providing human ratings of valence, arousal and dominance for more than 20,000 English words. His 2020 paper examines practical and ethical considerations in using emotion and sentiment lexicons. ACL elected him a fellow in 2025.
- Now at
- National Research Council Canada
- Works
- 208
- Citations
- 15,805
- h-index
- 53
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
2010
Words and emotions
Mohammad and Peter Turney coauthored a paper on using crowdsourcing to create an emotion lexicon. The paper appeared at a 2010 workshop. Their work created resources associating words and phrases with emotion.
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2018
Measuring three dimensions of meaning
Mohammad introduced the NRC VAD Lexicon with human ratings of valence, arousal and dominance for more than 20,000 English words. He used best-worst scaling to obtain scores. The paper also examines differences in shared understanding across demographic groups.
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2020
Checking practical and ethical use
His paper on emotion and sentiment lexicons discusses practical and ethical considerations in using the resources effectively. It explicitly connects these issues with lexical resources he created, including the NRC Emotion Lexicon.
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2025
Recognition in language research
ACL elected Mohammad a fellow in 2025. The fellowship recognizes Mohammad’s work on emotion and sentiment analysis and ethical considerations in NLP.
Sources and credits
Photo: saifmohammad.com; Saif | Homepage; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: saifmohammad.com. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.