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 and ML/AI for social good: e.g., science, 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.

News

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

Sep 2023

Congrats to Rohan and Aditya! Their work in progress on narrative modeling will be featured in the 2023 Text as Data Conference

... see all News