About Us

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:

• What language use can tell us about culture and society.
• Analyzing content at scale in traditional and emerging media, and grounding our findings in relevant theory
• Applications of NLP for human factors and socio-technical systems: e.g., science communication and discovery, education, collaboration, safety, accessibility, fairness
• Incorporating a cross-disciplinary lens to our research whenever appropriate
• Studying and developing computational methods and tools that facilitate all of the above

To this purpose, we maintain a research agenda that balances methods and applications. Our ongoing project span the following areas:

• Explainable and knowledge-infused ML methods (e.g. structured prediction, relational learning and neuro-symbolic methods) and their applicability to NLP.
• Discourse and pragmatics
• Narrative modeling and understanding
• Rhetoric and argumentation
• NLP for human-computer interaction, education and computational social science.