brendan o’connor

At UMass Amherst, we will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Applications due December 1. See the job posting here: careers.umass.edu/jobs/assista...

Looking forward to the Text as Data conference on Monday at UC Berkeley! I will be presenting our new paper "Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks" which is a joint effort with Navya Mehrotra and @gligoric.bsky.social. 🧵

I'm currently located in the bay area, so I'm excited to be at #tada2026 tomorrow presenting a poster on synthetic data augmentation for domain-restricted humanities language modeling and its implications for lexical leakage. I really enjoyed my last Text as Data experience, happy to see it back

#TADA2026 is now up on lea.ac! Full schedule, filterable by people you follow, a custom feed, and more! (This is not part of the official TADA organization, just an experiment. Try it out and let us know what you think! Also a nice way to follow along virtually if you can't attend in person!)

This year UMass Amherst CICS will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Job ad to be posted soon. For anyone at #TADA2026 or #COLM2026 this week, I or my colleague Hamed Zamani would love to chat or answer questions about it - just say hi or send me an email to meet!

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

the #colm2026 papers most discussed on bsky/atproto. i hadn't seen some of these papers!

If you haven't yet registered for TADA 2026 on October 5th (day before COLM), registration is open to the public! Detailed schedule forthcoming, but lots of fantastic posters and talks. We even have a second half-day of lightning talks scheduled! tada2026.eventbrite.com

The deadline has been extended to Monday, August 3 --

🏆The Computational Linguistics High Impact Paper Award recognises papers published in Computational Linguistics within the past 3–5 years that have already demonstrated exceptional scholarly impact. Congratulations to the authors of doi.org/10.1162/coli... #NLProc #CLjournal @chrmanning.bsky.social

Text as Data has been a wonderful, long-running, non-archival workshop for empirical research at the intersection of AI and social science (especially work involving text). After a few years off, it will be happening again this year as a one-day event in early October!

TADA is back!!! Abstract submissions very soon, take a look!

Text as Data is happening at Berkeley right before COLM. Please share!

With my ACL PC abilities, I wanted to characterize who these folks are, whether they're actually "outsiders", whether their papers are much less likely to be accepted, is this growth just LLM slop? The whole analsis is here medium.com/@jurgens_245...

Comments can be submitted here - www.regulations.gov/commenton/OM... i submitted this, fwiw

Scholarly folks who have ever received federal funding: today is the deadline for public comment on proposed revisions that will decimate our national research capacity and replace expertise with political whim. Please consider throwing in your 2¢. See below for some useful links and encouragement.

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a... Now up at @knightcolumbia.org - Cosma Shalizi and myself on "AI as Social Technology." It says that AI models are really a technology of social mediation that allow humans to connect with thoughts of other humans. Short-ish thread with major points follows.

What is cultural awareness in LLMs & what has been done in the literature for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion & methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness? This survey answers all these questions: doi.org/10.1162/COLI... #NLProc

I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology. The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome. Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷

terrible (...we go there a lot)

evergreen

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

deleted a QT discussing a shockingly sexist email written by roger schank. these people were so evil just seeing their emails is not good

I am flabbergasted I am by how much vibe coding has expanded my capacities as a scientist and teacher. In the last few weeks, I've mocked up class demos of a live turing test, generated cross-references for an encyclopedia, and prototyped new tablet tasks for developmental psych. It's wild.

to turn off autoplaying video on the bluesky mobile app select the icon in the top left corner go to settings go to content and media make sure "autoplay videos and gifs" is toggled off

Paul's back and he nails it here

✨The NLP+CSS workshop is returning to ACL 2026!✨ And this year, we have a new shared task with prizes! Website/CfP: sites.google.com/site/nlpandc... Deadlines: March 5 (direct), March 24 (pre-reviewed ARR) #NLProc #CompSocialSci #ComputationalSocialScience #ACL2026NLP @aclmeeting.bsky.social

"Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p... I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.

The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!

Here at UMass Amherst CICS, we’re searching for TT faculty in NLP – see the link from www.cics.umass.edu/about/employ... I’m happy to answer questions of course, too!

Great connections between our linguistics department and the CICS NLP program (including Katrin Erk now in a joint appointment). Also happy to communicate with prospective applicants.

the way this is going the only trustworthy information will be from in-person interviews. for annotation projects i find it much easier to trust small numbers of expert or local students annotators, compared to broad-audience online recruiting