- January 2021: Our paper on prosocial conversations was accepted at the Web Conference (WWW) based on work from U-M undegrads Jiajun Bao and Yiming Zhang and summer visitor Junjie Wu, in collaborating with (now-professor!) Eshwar Chandrasekharan. We look at different dimensions of what can go right in a conversation and show that the prosocial direction of a conversation is actually predicable from its onset. Congrats to all!
- January 2021: Some great news to start the year with PhD student Julia Mendelsohn winning an honorable mention for the Twitch Research Fellowship. Way to go Julia!!!
- December 2020: David gives the keynote at the PEOPLES workshop at COLING. What a wonderful group of folks and many interesting conversations and questions. Thank you Malvina, Viviana, and Barbara for the invitation!
- December 2020: Sky Wang receives an honorable mention by the CRA for the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Amazing work, Sky! Blablablab has been incredibly fortunate to have so many fantastic undergraduates and Sky joins Sayan Ghosh who received an honorable mention last year.
- September 2020: Two long papers accepted to EMNLP this year: First-year PhD student Jiaxin Pei's work on quantifying intimacy in language (with lots of cool Social Psych) and junior Naitian Zhou's work on condolence and empathy in online communities (work done as a sophormore!). Congrats to both and more details, data, and models to come soon!
- July 2020: Whoa—our paper on identfying Russian trolls on Twitter was Best Paper Runner Up at WebSci! Congrats to all the co-authors!
- July 2020: David gave a talk at the AKBC workshop on NLP for Scientific Texts (SciNLP) on bias in which authors are mentioned in the news stories on their published papers, based on work with Hao Peng and Misha Teplitskiy. These informal citations matter and add up to who we think of as a scientist. You can check out all the cool talks here too.
- July 2020: The NSF has graciously awarded David and co-PI Daniel Romero an NSF grant to study the communicative and behavioral dynamics of social relationships. Thanks NSF for your support!!
- June 2020: Summer is here!! 😎🌞⛱️ (...well, beginning after the EMNLP submission deadline) Welcome to Christina Lu and Kenan Alkiek who are joining us for the summer.
- May 2020: Congrats to all the graduating seniors this year: Jiajun Bao (→CMU LTI, MS), Justin Chen (→GaTech, MS), Shengyu Feng, Thomas Horak, Sam Lee, Wenhao Li (→UNC PhD), Junjie Wu (→HKUST PhD), Yiming Zhang, and Zach Zipper (→U-M, MS)!
- April 2020: Wowza, seven IC2S2 abstracts from the lab made it in! Time to get those talks and posters ready. Looking forward to seeing how the virtual conference turns out and excited we can share videos of this work in the future! ✨
- April 2020: Congrats to Blablablab collaborators Jane Im, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Jackson Sargent, Paige Lighthammer, Taylor Denby, and Ankit Bhargava on getting our paper on detecting Russian trolls on Twitter accepted to WebSci 2020! This is the first paper for Jackson, Paiges, Taylor, and Ankit and hopefully the start of a great journey.
- March 2020: Congrats to Blablablab member Julia receiving an honorable mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program!
- Febrary 2020: Congrats to Blablablab collaborator Ashwin for being awarded a Facebook Fellowship for Computational Social Science! Looking foward to seeing all the great things you'll do.
- January 2020: Congrats to Minje for getting a paper accepted to the Web Conference based on his summer internship at NOKIA Bell Labs! Great work!
- December 2019: Sayan was selected for an Honorable Mention by the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research awards! Amazing work and he made it in the CSE News — so famous 🤩 !
- November 2019: Blablablab collaborator Yulia Tsvetkov (CMU) presents our paper on microagressions at EMNLP! A tough but important classification problem for reducing incivility online. The paper reads pretty well for being written by academics too.
- November 2019: Our paper at SocInfo on cross-cultural norms for social roles was nominated for best paper!
- October 2019: How can we make beautiful
maps like the one below that show regional variation in language?
We have the answer for you! David is at NWAV presenting a tutorial on this with Jack Grieve. Check out the code and materials here, or just peek at the html-exported Juypter notebook online! Happy map making! - September 2019: A new fall season brings new PhD students. Welcome Aparna, Jiaxin, and Julia!! 👋
- July-August 2019: Blablablabbers Zijian and Sayan present the group's research at IC2S2 and ACL respectively. Look at that science delivery—such grace, such poise!
- July 2019: What attributes to people ascribe to social roles and what those roles do? New paper on cross-cultural norms for social roles examines this question and was accepted at Social Informatics with CSE collaborators MeiXing Dong, Carmen Banea, and Rada Mihalcea! Congrats to MeiXing on her first conference paper!
- June 2019: New paper out with collaborators from the School of Public Health showing systematic underrecognition of suicide amoung people transitioning to or living in long-term care facilities like nursing homes—serious stuff!—using NLP. Individuals' loss of identity and agency in this setting can have this profound and negative outcome and needs to be better recognized.
- June 2019: Ashwin, Ram, and David win Best Paper at ICWSM for their work on measuring attitudes about caste discrimination through intercaste marriage!! Incredibly proud of this work!
- June 2019: Wowza! Our UMich team was one of the 10 teams selected for the Amazon Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3! Way to go team! Can't wait to introduce the world to our super social Audrey!
- May 2019: The poster for our WebConf paper on demographic inference for more accurate surveys won the Best Poster Presentation award! Check out the poster here--be careful of the sea monsters!
- May 2019: Two papers accepted at ACL 2019! Congrats to co-authors MSI student Innocent Ndubuisi-Obi and CSE undergrad Sayan Ghosh for our work on understanding English-Naija code-switching and to co-authors UMSI Faculty Libby Hemphill and visiting student Eshwar Chandrasekha for our position paper arguing what should be the next steps for the NLP community in tackling abusive behavior.
- April 2019: The NSF has graciously awarded David a CRII grant to study the language of social relationships. Thanks NSF!
- March 2019: Blablablab celebrates an ICWSM acceptance on a paper about caste discrimination with collaborator Ashwin!
- February 2019: David travels to UCLA to talk with their Computational Sociology group. Great visit and wonderful folks doing amazing research there!
- January, 2019: Blablablab celebrates even more as two Web Conference long papers are accepted! Congrats to now-alumnus Zijian for being first author on one!
- January, 2019: Blablablab celebrates the new year in style... and then furiously sprints to get those ICWSM papers in! Great job everyone!
- December, 2018: You can't spell breakthrough without break, so the group gets some much-needed rest over the holiday season.
- November, 2018: Just in time for the election, Jane showed that Russian trolls are still active on Twitter and trying to interact with major news reporters. Timely stuff!
- November, 2018: Jane presents her work on Wikipedia conflict resolution at CSCW and David and Zijian meet up in Brussels to talk about access to support in online communities. The lab hopes that Jane will bring back Montreal-style bagels too.
- October, 2018: David is off to NWAV47 to talk about Computational Sociolinguistics! He came back with a mountain of Montreal-style Bagels and a new appreciation for the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
- September, 2018: New PhD rotating students Jane Im and Minje Choi arrive at UMSI! Welcome Jane and Minje!
- August, 2018: New EMNLP paper on supportive/unsupportive language accepted with undergraduate first author Zijian Wang! In online conversations, users who indicate they are women really do receive more unsupportive replies--yet they also receive more supportive replies. Lots of interesting follow-up questions on gendered interactions online #FoodForThought
- August, 2018: Visiting students Akshita Jha, Qi Sun, and Nan Gu depart physically but remain with us in spirit and co-authorship. Wonderful having you here with us this summer!