*Who:* Corrado Monti, post-doc candidate *Title:* /*Semantic networks: applications and modelling*/ ***Abstract: * Semantic networks are one of the most valuable tools in today's NLP. They power the intelligence behind conversational interfaces, help search engines answer queries, and are one the most used ways to represent the knowledge present in natural language. In this talk, I will present some of my work related to them. Firstly, we will see an example of a simple use case for semantic networks within opinion mining. I will show how we used them to build a model able to detect political disaffection in Twitter messages in Italian language. Semantic networks here helped, e.g., in distinguishing general political disaffection from a sentiment against a specific political party. We applied this model to 35 millions tweets, and – in order to validate the quality of the generated time-series – we compared our results to opinion surveys. Secondly, I will illustrate a theoretical model for semantic networks. In a semantic network, each node is usually tagged with different categories. How does the presence or absence of such categories interplay with the network link structure? I will present a model that is able to describe complex interactions between categories and links, while at the same time being simple enough to derive scalable algorithms. Finally, I will show a practical application for this model on semantic networks, presenting an algorithm to mine surprising links. ***When:* Thursday, 29th of March 2018, 10:15-10:45 * Where: *Manno, Galleria 1,  room G1-204 * *