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Brendan T. O'ConnorAssociate Professor, College of Information and Computer SciencesUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst Email: brenocon@cs.umass.edu Twitter: @brendan642 Room 238, Computer Science Building, 140 Governors Drive, Amherst, MA 01003 |
I am an associate professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst. My group is the SLANG Lab, part of UMass NLP. I am also affiliated with the Computational Social Science Institute, the Initiative in Cognitive Science, and the Centers for Data Science and Intelligent Information Retrieval.
Links: CV, Bio, Teaching, Talks, Notes, Misc.
In Spring 2022, I'm on sabbatical and not teaching.
Some previous research talks:
- Identifying police killings from text with distant supervision
- Demographic bias in social media language analysis: a case study of African-American English
Some current collaborative projects:
- FACT CHAMP: Fact-checker, Academic, and Community Collaboration Tools: Combating Hate, Abuse, and Misinformation with Minority-led Partnerships
- Understanding variation in African American Language: Corpus and prosodic fieldwork perspectives
Press coverage:
- This AI reads the news to keep tabs on US police shootings, New Scientist, September 2017.
- AI Programs Are Learning to Exclude Some African-American Voices, MIT Technology Review, August 2017.
Research:
What can statistical text analysis tell us about society?
I develop
text analysis
methods
that can help answer social science
questions.
I'm interested in
statistical 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.
See also my earlier research statement or publications below.
There is a rich set of other faculty at UMass interested in areas from computational social science to natural language processing. See the Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI) website, and the UMass NLP affiliates.
Background:
I joined UMass after receiving my PhD
from
Carnegie Mellon University's
Machine Learning Department.
I have also been a
Visiting Fellow at Harvard IQSS,
and
interned with the Facebook Data Science team.
Before grad school,
I worked on crowdsourced annotations at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs,
and
natural language search at Powerset.
I started studying the intersection of AI and social science
as an undergrad and masters student in
Stanford
Symbolic Systems (cognitive science).
Link: Full bio.
Papers/Publications
(For others, see Google Scholar or my CV.)-
Text as Causal Mediators: Research Design for Causal Estimates of Differential Treatment of Social Groups via Language Aspects.Forthcoming, First Workshop on Causal Inference & NLP (CI-NLP) at EMNLP 2021. Additional forthcoming presentation at 11th Annual Conference on New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data (TADA 2021).
- Abstract presented at the UnImplicit workshop at ACL-IJCNLP 2021.
- Findings of ACL 2021. Also presented at the CASE workshop at ACL-IJCNLP 2021
-
Global Networks. 2020.
- See Kevin and Tuugi's article about this work at The Conversation.
- Another [pdf] copy.
- NLP+CSS workshop at EMNLP 2020 (Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science).
- NLP+CSS workshop at EMNLP 2020 (Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science).
- Proceedings of ACL 2020.
-
Proceedings of EMNLP 2019.
- Data
- Press coverage: The Undefeated website, Twitter thread