the academic record

Papers

For twenty years, under the name Hugo Liu, I studied at the MIT Media Lab how machines might read human meaning — taste, affect, common sense, the semantics of everyday language. The work is gathered here, and it is free: every paper is one click to read, every citation one click to copy.

6,611 citations 24 h-index 31 i10-index Google Scholar · June 2026

selected writing

Social network profiles as taste performancesjournal article

Hugo Liu (2007). Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1), 252–275, Blackwell Publishing.

775 citations
Read

Small happiness: aesthetic strategies for witting consumers

Hugo Liu, trans. Wu Gang (2007). Cultural Review, November 2007: 32–39, Shanghai.

PDF

From programming the unconscious to aesthetic technologiesPortuguese

Hugo Liu & Paulo Urbano (2007). Interview, Nada 9, Portugal.

PDF

Introduction to the semantics of people and culture (editorial preface)

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes (2007). International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, Special Issue on Semantics of People and Culture (Eds. H. Liu & P. Maes) 3(1), Idea Group.

PDF

Of men, women, and computers: data-driven gender modeling for improved user interfaces

Hugo Liu & Rada Mihalcea (2007). Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Boulder, CO.

PDF

Superconsumer: a postmodern romance

Hugo Liu (2006). Nada 8, Portugal.

PDF

computational aesthetics

Unraveling the taste fabric of social networks

Hugo Liu, Pattie Maes & Glorianna Davenport (2006). International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 2(1), 42–71. Reprinted 2008, Idea Group.

250 citations
PDF

Computing Point-of-View: Modeling and Simulating Judgments of TastePhD dissertation

Hugo Liu (2006). Ph.D. Dissertation, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, MIT, 163pp.

PDF

Rendering aesthetic impressions of text in color space

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes (2006). International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 15(4), 515–550, World Scientific.

PDF

Taste fabrics and the beauty of homogeneity

Hugo Liu, Glorianna Davenport & Pattie Maes (2006). AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin, vol. 3.

PDF

Self-reflexive performance: dancing with the computed audience of culture

Hugo Liu & Glorianna Davenport (2005). International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 1(3), 237–247, Intellect Ltd.

PDF

Synesthetic Recipes: foraging for food with the family, in taste-space

Hugo Liu, Matthew Hockenberry & Ted Selker (2005). Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angeles.

PDF

The aesthetiscope: visualizing aesthetic readings of text in color space

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes (2005). Proceedings of the 18th International FLAIRS Conference (AI in Music & Art track), 74–79, AAAI Press.

PDF

InterestMap: harvesting social network profiles for recommendations

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes (2005). Proceedings of IUI Beyond Personalization 2005, San Diego, CA, 54–59.

186 citations
PDF

Articulation, the letter, and the spirit in the aesthetics of narrative

Hugo Liu (2004). Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism, and Context (SRMC’04), New York.

PDF

sentiment analysis

A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge

Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman & Ted Selker (2003). Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2003), 125–132, ACM Press.

790 citationsACM IUI Outstanding Paper Award
PDF

A corpus-based approach to finding happiness

Rada Mihalcea & Hugo Liu (2006). Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs, AAAI Press.

273 citations
PDF

What would they think? a computational model of attitudes

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes (2004). Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2004), 38–45, ACM Press.

60 citations
PDF

Visualizing the affective structure of a text document

Hugo Liu, Ted Selker & Henry Lieberman (2003). Proceedings of CHI 2003, 740–741, ACM Press.

97 citations
PDF

semantics of natural language

NLP (natural language processing) for NLP (natural language programming)

Rada Mihalcea, Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2006). Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (Ed. A. Gelbukh), LNCS 3878, 319–330, Springer.

159 citations
PDF

Metafor: visualizing stories as code

Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2005). Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2005), 305–307, ACM Press.

151 citations
PDF

Programmatic semantics for natural language interfaces

Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2005). Proceedings of CHI 2005, 1597–1600, ACM Press.

76 citations
PDF

Feasibility studies for programming in natural language

Henry Lieberman & Hugo Liu (2006). End-User Development (Eds. Lieberman, Paternò, Wulf), HCI Series Vol. 9, 459–474, Springer.

62 citations
PDF

Toward a programmatic semantics of natural language

Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2004). Proceedings of VL/HCC’04: 20th IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 281–282, IEEE.

PDF

Saurus: an emotionally-weighted thesaurus

Jim Gouldstone, Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman & Hiroshi Ishii (2006). Proceedings of the AAAI-06 Workshop on Computational Aesthetics, 107–110, AAAI Press.

PDF

Langutils: a natural language toolkit for common lisp

Ian Eslick & Hugo Liu (2005). Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference (ILC 2005), Stanford, CA.

PDF

Unpacking meaning from words

Hugo Liu (2003). Modeling and Using Context (Eds. Blackburn et al.), LNCS 2680, 218–232, Springer.

PDF

common sense reasoning

ConceptNet: a practical commonsense reasoning toolkit

Hugo Liu & Push Singh (2004). BT Technology Journal 22(4), 211–226, Kluwer Academic.

2,454 citations
PDF

Commonsense reasoning in and over natural language

Hugo Liu & Push Singh (2004). Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (Eds. Negoita, Howlett, Jain), LNCS 3215, 293–306, Springer.

217 citations
PDF

Beating common sense into interactive applications

Henry Lieberman, Hugo Liu, Push Singh & Barbara Barry (2004). AI Magazine 25(4), 63–76, AAAI Press.

187 citations
PDF

Teaching machines about everyday life

Push Singh, Barbara Barry & Hugo Liu (2004). BT Technology Journal 22(4), 227–240, Kluwer Academic.

101 citations
PDF

Goose: a goal-oriented search engine with commonsense

Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman & Ted Selker (2002). Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (Eds. De Bra, Brusilovsky, Conejo), LNCS 2347, 253–263, Springer.

116 citationsBest AI Paper Award · Asociación Española de Inteligencia Artificial
PDF

Makebelieve: using commonsense to generate stories

Hugo Liu & Push Singh (2002). Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2002), 957–958, AAAI Press.

120 citations
PDF

Adaptive linking between text and photos using common sense reasoning

Henry Lieberman & Hugo Liu (2002). Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (Eds. De Bra, Brusilovsky, Conejo), LNCS 2347, 2–11, Springer.

108 citations
PDF

Semantic Understanding and Commonsense Reasoning in an Adaptive Photo AgentM.Eng. thesis

Hugo Liu (2002). M.Eng. Thesis, School of EECS, MIT, 160pp.

PDF

Robust photo retrieval using world semantics

Hugo Liu & Henry Lieberman (2002). Proceedings of the LREC 2002 Workshop on Creating and Using Semantics for Information Retrieval and Filtering, Las Palmas, 15–20, LREC Press.

48 citations
PDF

MontyLingua: an end-to-end natural language processor with common sensesoftware / tech report

Hugo Liu (2004). MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge, MA.

87 citations

later work

What social media sentiment tells us about the ebb and flow of a city's moodsbook chapter

Nancy Etcoff & Hugo Liu (2017). In A. Karandinou (Ed.): Data and Senses — Architecture, Neuroscience and the Digital Worlds, University of East London.

Brand choice as gender identityworkshop paper

Elizabeth F. Churchill & Hugo Liu (2014). Proceedings of the CHI 2014 Workshop: Perspectives on Gender and Product Design, ACM Press.

← back home