Brendan T. O'Connor - UMass Amherst, Computer Science

Time 2022-09-11 17:06:14

Web Name: Brendan T. O'Connor - UMass Amherst, Computer Science

WebSite: http://www.anyall.org

ID:312010

Keywords:

UMass,Connor,Brendan,Science

Description:

Brendan T. O'Connor

Associate Professor, College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Email: brenocon@cs.umass.eduTwitter: @brendan642
Room 238, Computer Science Building, 140 Governors Drive, Amherst, MA 01003

I am an associate professor in theCollege of Information and Computer Sciencesat University of Massachusetts Amherst.My group is the SLANG Lab,part of UMass NLP.I am alsoaffiliated with theComputational Social Science Institute,the Initiative in Cognitive Science,andthe Centers for Data Science andIntelligent Information Retrieval.

Links:CV,Bio,Teaching,Talks,Notes,Misc.

I'm on sabbatical and parental leave in 2022.

Some previous research talks:Identifying police killings from text with distant supervisionDemographic bias in social medialanguage 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 PartnershipsUnderstanding 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 analysismethods that can help answer social sciencequestions.I'm interested in statistical machine learning andnatural language processing,especially when informed by or applied to areas likepolitical science or sociolinguistics.My work often uses text data from news and social media.

See also my earlier research statementor publications below.

There is a rich set of other faculty at UMass interested inareas from computational social scienceto natural language processing.See the Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI) website,and the UMass NLP affiliates.

Background:
I joined UMass after receiving my PhDfromCarnegie Mellon University'sMachine Learning Department.I have also been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard IQSS,andinterned with the Facebook Data Science team.Before grad school,I worked on crowdsourced annotations at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs,andnatural language search at Powerset.I started studying the intersection of AI and social scienceas an undergrad and masters student in StanfordSymbolic Systems (cognitive science).

Link: Full bio.

Papers/Publications

(For others, see Google Scholar or myCV.) Paying Attention to the Algorithm Behind the Curtain. Arun Dunna,Katherine A. Keith, Ethan Zuckerman,Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez,Brendan O'Connor,andRishab Nithyanand. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ACM CSCW 2022). ClioQuery: Interactive Query-Oriented Text Analytics for Comprehensive Investigation of Historical News Archives. Abram Handler,Narges Mahyar, and Brendan O'Connor. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 2022. Links: ACM, arxiv Text as Causal Mediators: Research Design for Causal Estimates of Differential Treatment of Social Groups via Language Aspects. Katherine A. Keith, Douglas Rice, and Brendan O'Connor. First Workshop on Causal Inference & NLP (CI-NLP) at EMNLP 2021.
Presentation at 11th Annual Conference on New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data (TADA 2021). Challenges in Detecting Null Relativizers in African American Language for Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Applications. Anissa Neal, Brendan O'Connor,and Lisa Green. Abstract presented at the UnImplicit workshop at ACL-IJCNLP 2021. Corpus-Level Evaluation for Event QA: The IndiaPoliceEvents Corpus Covering the 2002 Gujarat Violence. Andrew Halterman, Katherine A. Keith, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, and Brendan O'Connor. Findings of ACL 2021. Also presented at the CASE workshop at ACL-IJCNLP 2021 Data and code, arxiv version (obsolete) How white is the global elite? An analysis of race, gender and network structure. Kevin L. Young, Seth K. Goldman, Brendan O'Connor, and Tuugi Chuluun. Global Networks. 2021. See Kevin and Tuugi's article about this work at The Conversation.Honorable Mention, Political Ties Award for Best Published Article in 2021, APSA Political Networks section. Links: Journal, PDF Uncertainty over Uncertainty: Investigating the Assumptions, Annotations, and Text Measurements of Economic Policy Uncertainty. Katherine A. Keith, Christoph Teichmann, Brendan O'Connor, and Edgar Meij. NLP+CSS workshop at EMNLP 2020 (Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science). Analyzing Gender Bias within Narrative Tropes. Dhruvil Gala, Mohammad Omar Khursheed, Hannah Lerner, Brendan O'Connor, and Mohit Iyyer. NLP+CSS workshop at EMNLP 2020 (Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science). Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimates. Katherine A. Keith, David Jensen, and Brendan O'Connor. Proceedings of ACL 2020. Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts.Jack Merullo, Luke Yeh,Abram Handler, Alvin Grissom II, Brendan O'Connor, and Mohit Iyyer.Proceedings of EMNLP 2019.DataPress coverage: The Undefeated website, Twitter thread Query-focused Sentence Compression in Linear Time.Abram Handler and Brendan O'Connor.Proceedings of EMNLP 2019. Uncertainty-aware generative models for inferring document class prevalence. Katherine A. Keith and Brendan O'Connor. Proceedings of EMNLP 2018. Website Twitter Universal Dependency Parsing for African-American and Mainstream American English.Su Lin Blodgett,Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei,andBrendan O'Connor.Proceedings of ACL 2018.Monte Carlo Syntax Marginals for Exploring and Using Dependency Parses. Katherine A. Keith, Su Lin Blodgett, and Brendan O'ConnorProceedings of NAACL 2018.Relational Summarization for Corpus Analysis. Abram Handler and Brendan O'ConnorProceedings of NAACL 2018. Understanding the Representational Power of Neural Retrieval Models Using NLP Tasks. Daniel Cohen, Brendan O'Connor, and W. Bruce Croft. Proceedings of ICTIR 2018. Evaluating Syntactic Properties of Seq2seq Output with a BroadCoverage HPSG: A Case Study on Machine Translation. Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Khiem Pham, Brian Dillon, and Brendan O'Connor, BlackboxNLP workshopat EMNLP 2018 (Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP). A Probabilistic Approach for Learning with Label Proportions Applied to the US Presidential Election.Tao Sun,Daniel Sheldon,andBrendan O'Connor.Proceedings of ICDM 2017.Identifying civilians killed by police with distantly supervised entity-event extraction. Katherine A. Keith, Abram Handler, Michael Pinkham, Cara Magliozzi, Joshua McDuffie, and Brendan O'Connor.Proceedings of EMNLP 2017. Website Video presentation by Katherine A. Keith. ACL Anthology pageRookie: A unique approach for exploring news archives.Abram Handlerand Brendan O'Connor.Workshop on Data Science + Journalism at KDD 2017.WebsiteRacial Disparity in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Social Media African-American English. Su Lin Blodgett and Brendan O'Connor.Fairness, Accountability, and Transparencyin Machine Learning (FAT/ML) workshop at KDD 2017.A Dataset and Classifier for Recognizing Social Media English.Su Lin Blodgett,Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei,andBrendan O'Connor.3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT) at EMNLP 2017.
Best paper award.Learning to Extract Events from Knowledge Base Revisions.Alexander Konovalov,Benjamin Strauss,Alan Ritter and Brendan O'Connor.Proceedings of WWW 2017.Bag of What? Simple Noun Phrase Extraction for Text Analysis.Abram Handler,Matthew J. Denny,Hanna Wallach,andBrendan O'Connor.NLP+CSS Workshop at EMNLP 2016.phrasemachine softwareSlides (presenation at Text as Data conference, October 2016)Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English.Su Lin Blodgett,Lisa Green,and Brendan O'Connor.Proceedings of EMNLP 2016.Improving Entity Ranking for Keyword Queries.John Foley,Brendan O'Connor,and James Allan.Proceedings of CIKM 2016.DataVisualizing textual models with in-text and word-as-pixel highlighting.Abram Handler,Su Lin Blodgett,and Brendan O'Connor.At WHI 2016 - Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (workshop at ICML 2016).Challenges of Visualizing Differentially Private Data.Dan Zhang,Michael Hay, Gerome Miklau and Brendan O'Connor.At TPDP 2016 - Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (workshop at ICML 2016).Posterior calibration and exploratory analysis for natural language processing models.Khanh Nguyen and Brendan O'Connor.Proceedings of EMNLP 2015.Diffusion of lexical variation in online social media. Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O'Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing.PLOS-ONE, November 2014.Also arXiv:1210.5268; an earlier version was from Oct. 2012 and poster at NIPS 2012 Workshop on Social Network and Social Media Analysis.Thesis: Statistical Text Analysis for Social Science.Brendan O'Connor.PhD Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2014.MiTextExplorer: Linked brushing and mutual information for exploratory text data analysis.Brendan O'Connor.ACL Workshop on Interactive Language Learning, Visualization, and Interfaces, June 2014. (Proceedings of ACL 2014.)Software websiteCMU: Arc-Factored, Discriminative Semantic Dependency Parsing.Sam Thomson, Brendan O'Connor,Jeffrey Flanigan,David Bamman,Jesse Dodge,Swabha Swayamdipta,Nathan Schneider,Chris Dyer,and Noah A. Smith.In SemEval-2014 (Proceedings of the International (COLING) Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, Dublin, Ireland, August 2014).Learning to Extract International Relations from Political Context.Brendan O'Connor, Brandon M. Stewart, and Noah A. Smith.Proceedings of ACL 2013.Poster, slides, appendix, softwareLearning Latent Personae of Film Characters.David Bamman, Brendan O'Connor, and Noah A. Smith.Proceedings of ACL 2013.DataImproved Part-of-Speech Tagging for Online Conversational Text with Word ClustersOlutobi Owoputi, Brendan O’Connor, Chris Dyer, Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider and Noah A. Smith. Proceedings of NAACL 2013Software and dataARKref: a rule-based coreference resolution system.Brendan O'Connor and Michael Heilman.arXiv:1310.1975, Oct 2013.Learning Frames from Text with an Unsupervised Latent Variable Model.Brendan O'Connor.arXiv:1307.7382,Data Analysis Project report, Machine Learning Department, CMU.July 2013. A framework for (under)specifying dependency syntax without overloading annotators. Nathan Schneider, Brendan O’Connor, Naomi Saphra, David Bamman, Manaal Faruqui, Noah A. Smith, Chris Dyer, and Jason Baldridge.In Linguistic Annotation Workshop, 2013.[extended version arXiv:1306:2091]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 Proceedings of 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 Flaniganand Noah A. Smith.In ACL-2011 (short paper).Data and softwareA 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 Proceedings of EMNLP 2010 (presentation).AppendixDataPress 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, SlidesPress 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).DemoSuperficial 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, Draft (with color) 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

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