With sadness, the ACL exec announces the premature passing of one of our own, Janyce M. Wiebe, ACL Fellow 2015. Jan was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a former director of the Pitt Intelligent Systems Program. She was a pioneer in the now burgeoning fields of sentiment, affect and subjectivity. Her PhD thesis (1990) -Recognizing Subjective Sentences: A Computational Investigation of Narrative Text- was an early computational investigation of subjectivity in NLP. She contributed to the establishment of sentiment analysis and opinion mining, and developed several models and resources, including the MPQA opinion annotated corpus. She also made fundamental contributions to word sense disambiguation, discourse processing, and the theory and practice of corpus annotation.
An obituary can be found at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/postgazette/obituary.aspx?n=janyce-marb...
Sincerely,
ACL Executive Committee