His research interests are in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially Lexical Semantics, Emotions in Language, Sentiment Analysis, Computational Creativity, Fairness in NLP, Psycholinguistics, and Information Visualization. He has published over 90 scientific articles (journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers). He has served in various capacities at prominent journals and conferences, including: chair of the Canada--UK symposium on Ethics in AI, co-chair of SemEval (the largest platform for semantic evaluations), workshops co-chair for ACL, co-organizer of WASSA (a sentiment analysis workshop), and area chair for ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP (in the areas of sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, and fairness in NLP). His team developed a sentiment analysis system which ranked first in shared task competitions. His word-emotion resources, such as the NRC Emotion Lexicon, are used for for analyzing affect in text. His work has garnered media attention, including articles in Time, SlashDot, LiveScience, io9, The Physics arXiv Blog, PC World, and Popular Science.