Brendan O'Connor

What can statistical text analysis tell us about society? I seek to develop practical and scientifically rigorous text mining methods that can help answer social science questions.

I'm generally interested in machine learning and natural language processing, especially when informed by or applied to areas like political science or sociolinguistics. My work often uses text data from news and social media.

I'm a Machine Learning Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)'s School of Computer Science, in Noah's ARK research group.

I've been an intern on the Facebook Data Science team, and before grad school, I worked on crowdsourced annotations at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs, as well as "semantic" search at Powerset. I was an undergrad at Stanford with a BS/MS in Symbolic Systems (cognitive science or so).

Recent Research

• Learning to Extract International Relations from Political Context.
  Brendan O'Connor, Brandon Stewart, and Noah A. Smith.
  Proceedings of ACL 2013.
  • Supplement, Data and software
• Learning Latent Personae of Film Characters.
  David Bamman, Brendan O'Connor, and Noah A. Smith.
  Proceedings of ACL 2013.
  • Data
• Mapping the geographical diffusion of new words.
  Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O'Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing.
  arXiv October 2012; poster at NIPS 2012 Workshop on Social Network and Social Media Analysis.
• Learning Frames from Text with an Unsupervised Latent Variable Model.
  Brendan O'Connor.
  Data Analysis Project report, Machine Learning Department, CMU. October 2012.
• Improved Part-of-Speech Tagging for Online Conversational Text with Word Clusters
  Olutobi Owoputi, Brendan O’Connor, Chris Dyer, Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider and Noah A. Smith.
  Proceedings of NAACL 2013
  • Software and data
• Censorship and Deletion Practices in Chinese Social Media.
  David Bamman, Brendan O'Connor, and Noah A. Smith.
  In First Monday 17.3, March 2012.
  • [web] [pdf]
  • Press coverage: BBC, New Scientist, etc.
• Computational Text Analysis for Social Science: Model Assumptions and Complexity.
  Brendan O'Connor, David Bamman, and Noah A. Smith.
  In NIPS Workshop on Comptuational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds, Sierra Nevada, Spain, December 2011.
• Predicting a Scientific Community's Response to an Article.
  Dani Yogatama, Michael Heilman, Brendan O'Connor, Chris Dyer, Bryan R. Routledge, and Noah A. Smith.
  In EMNLP-2011.
• Part-of-speech tagging for Twitter: Annotation, Features, and Experiments.
  Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider, Brendan O'Connor, Dipanjan Das, Daniel Mills, Jacob Eisenstein, Michael Heilman, Dani Yogatama, Jeffrey Flanigan and Noah A. Smith.
  In ACL-2011 (short paper).
  • Data and software
• A Mixture Model of Demographic Lexical Variation.
  Brendan O'Connor, Jacob Eisenstein, Eric P. Xing, and Noah A. Smith.
  In NIPS-2010 Workshop on Machine Learning and Social Computing.
• A Latent Variable Model for Geographic Lexical Variation.
  Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O'Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing.
  In EMNLP-2010 (presentation).
  • Data
  • Press coverage: New York Times, All Things Considered, BBC, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, New Scientist, San Francisco Chronicle, Ars Technica, LA Weekly, MSNBC, etc.
• From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series.
  Brendan O'Connor, Ramnath Balasubramanyan, Bryan R. Routledge, and Noah A. Smith.
  In ICWSM-2010 (presentation).
  • Video, Slides
  • Press coverage: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mashable, Ars Technica, New Scientist, CNN Tech, Fast Company, Science Now, Economic Times, BBC Radio 5 (at 13:00) and others.
• TweetMotif: Exploratory Search and Topic Summarization for Twitter.
  Brendan O'Connor, Michel Krieger, and David Ahn.
  In ICWSM-2010 (demo track).
  • Demo
• Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes.
  Brendan O'Connor and Lukas Biewald.
  In Beautiful Data, ed. Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher. O'Reilly Media. 2009.
  • Blog post, Data
• Cheap and Fast — But is it Good? Evaluating Non-Expert Annotations for Natural Language Tasks.
  Rion Snow, Brendan O’Connor, Daniel Jurafsky, and Andrew Y. Ng.
  In EMNLP-2008 (presentation).
  • Blog post, Slides, Data

Recent News

• Mar 22: talk at Northeastern (Lazer Lab)
• Feb 25: spoke at Columbia NLP group (abstract)
• November 16, 2012: spoke at UChicago Computational Social Science Workshop seminar series. [video] [slides (pdf)]
• October 4, 2012: spoke at UMass Amherst Machine Learning and Friends Lunch and Computational Social Science seminar. [slides (pdf)]
• May 2012 - panelist at the American Association for Public Opinion Research conference, for the panel "Survey Responses vs. Tweets: New Choices for Social Measurement." Talk: "From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series." [slides (ppt)]
• April 2012 - spoke at the New Faces in Political Methodology V workshop, Political Science Department, Penn State. Talk: "Corpus Analysis and Unsupervised Frame Learning from Text."

Demos

• ARKref, a coreference resolution system.
• ParseViz - quick and dirty parse tree/dependency visualization via graphviz.
• Demos that are now down or not that great
  • TweetMotif for summarizing twitter topics.
  • PalinSpeak - ELIZA meets n-grams meets tf/idf - politics chatbot. Currently down. Doug's blog post about it.
  • GhettoSearch - a shell script web search engine. Explanation and reddit discussion. The full site is down at the moment.
  • read a fortune/quote (code: fun fact, you can write cgi in shell)

Code

Elsewhere on the Internet

• On the Crowdflower Blog (a.k.a. Dolores Labs)
• My blog