Welcome to the webpage of the Boulder Language and Social Technologies research group (BLAST), led by Prof. Maria L. Pacheco.
We are based in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
At BLAST we work on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Computational Social Science. We are broadly interested in finding transparent and replicable insights to societally relevant problems through the computational analysis of language. In general, we are curious about:
To this purpose, we maintain a research agenda that balances methods and applications. Our ongoing project span the following areas:
Mar 2025
Congrats to Alex and Juan! Their preliminary work measurig dehumanization in human-agent conversations has been accepted to the Queer in AI Workshop, co-located with NAACL 2025!
Sep 2024
Congrats to Rohan and Aditya! Their work on framing through the lens of event-centric narratives has been accepted to the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, co-located with EMNLP 2024!
May 2024
Congrats to Alex! Her work on framing in economic news was accepted to ACL 2024!
May 2024
Maria will be giving a keynote at the Trustworthy NLP Workshop at NAACL 2024 in Mexico City
Apr 2024
Congrats to Alex! Her work on measuring interdisciplinary engagement in NLP+CSS scholarship was accepted to the Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science co-located with NAACL 2024
Mar 2024
Congrats to Matt! His work on neuro-symbolic models to detect propaganda techniques was accepted to SemEval 2024
Oct 2023
Congrats to DJ and Rohan! Their work on language to logic translation for verifying tax prep software was accepted to the Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing co-located with EMNLP 2023
Oct 2023
Maria will be giving a talk at the UMass NLP seminar on interactive concept models
Sep 2023
Congrats to Alex! Her work in progress on framing in economic news will be featured in the 2023 Text as Data Conference