Dr. Nils Smeuninx obtains PhD

Congrats to Dr. Nils Smeuninx for succesfully defending his PhD last Friday!

His dissertation entitled Dear Stakeholder. Exploring the language of sustainability reporting: a closer look at readability, sentiment and perception was supervised by Prof. dr. Bernard de Clerck (Ghent University), Prof. dr. Walter Aerts (Antwerp University) and Prof. dr. Véronique Hoste (Ghent University). Nils investigates the linguistic properties of the increasingly important genre of sustainability reporting. Using a large corpus of reports in different varieties of English, it conducts a perception study, sentiment analysis and machine learning, it examines these reports’ low readability and high positivity and formulates a number of ways in which the genre can better address its potentially very wide audience.