Brendan O'Connor

I'm interested in statistical machine learning and natural language processing, especially when informed by or applied to the social sciences, such as economics and political science.

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

In 2010 I was an intern on the Facebook Data Science team. Before grad school, I worked on crowdsourced annotations at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs, and before that, "semantic" search at Powerset. I was an undergrad at Stanford with a BS/MS in Symbolic Systems: cognitive science, broadly construed.

Recent Research

• 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 Proceedings of the 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, forthcoming JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings.
• 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

Demos

• TweetMotif for summarizing twitter topics.
• PalinSpeak - ELIZA meets n-grams meets tf/idf - politics chatbot. Currently down. Doug's blog post about it.
• ARKref, a coreference resolution system.
• KwicTwit - kwic layout for twitter search.
• Treeviz - quick and dirty parse tree/dependency visualization via graphviz.
• 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