We are very proud to announce that our former doctoral student in Computer Science, currently Dr. Ana-Maria Bucur, has been awarded the prize for the best doctoral dissertation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the XLII International Congress of the SEPLN (Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural), held from September 22 to 25, at the Universidad de León, Spain.
The prestigious award was granted for the thesis entitled “Computational Approaches to Mental Health Disorders Detection from Social Media Texts, Images and Videos“. The doctoral research was carried out within our doctoral school (ISDS-UB), under an agreement between the University of Bucharest and the Universitat Politècnica de València. The dissertation was co-advised by Professor Liviu P. Dinu, PhD Habil., faculty member at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Bucharest, and Professor Paolo Rosso, PhD, faculty member at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain.
The dissertation investigated how NLP methods and computational models can be deployed to detect indicators associated with mental health disorders within content published on social media platforms.
The SEPLN Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Natural Language Processing reached its 25th edition in 2026. The thesis were evaluated based on criteria such as the quality of the presentation, technical and methodological rigor, relevance, originality, the generation and evaluation of resources, and the researcher’s scientific trajectory throughout the doctoral period.
More information can be found on the University of Bucharest website.