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
- The study of socio-technical systems, from information ecosystems to team collaboration
- Theoretically-motivated approaches for analyzing content at scale in traditional and emerging media
- Human-centered aspects of language technology, and how it can be used to complement rather than replace human processess
- Developing computational methods and tools that facilitate all of the above
For more information, see our full list of publications.
We are not recruiting new PhD students.
News
April 2026
BLAST at ACL 2026: Congrats to Rohan (and team: Advait, Alex, Zohar), Alvin (and team: Rohan, Dananjay, Alexandria, Maksim), Obed, and Prajakta (in collaboration with Shira’s team at Amherst) for their papers accepted to ACL 2026. We have work spanning narrative induction, interactive knowledge discovery, logical common sense reasoning and mechanistic interpretability for language artifacts. Looking forward to a great conference!
March 2026
Congrats to Chloe! Her work building a longitudinal dataset of YouTube channels was accepted to ICWSM 2026
Feb 2026
Congrats to Mary! Her work on de-identified referring expressions was accepted to LREC 2026
Jan 2026
Congrats to Matt! His work on prompt-based structured prediction was accepted to EACL 2026
Sep 2025
BLAST at *SEM 2025: Congrats to Advait, Ashwin and Dananjay! Their work on long tail entity typing was accepted to *SEM. Also, congrats to Bagyasree! Her work on cross-domain persuasion detection was also accepted to *SEM
May 2025
BLAST at ACL 2025: Congrats to Aaron! His work on cross-lingual explanations of idiomatic expressions was accepted to the Findings of ACL. Also, congrats to Anirudh! His work on explaining Sudoku solutions in natural language was also accepted to the Findings of ACL
May 2025
Congrats to Ankush! His work on exploring the capabilities of LLMs to interpret AMRs was accepted to the Workshop on LLMs and Structure Modeling, co-located with ACL 2025
Apr 2025
BLAST at IC2S2 2025: Congrats to Chloe, her abstract on archival exhaustion to gather content creator data was accepted as a parallel talk! Congrats to Alex, her abstract on partisan economic reporting has also been accepted as a parallel talk!
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!