Welcome to the webpage of the Boulder Language and Social Technologies research group (BLAST). We are based in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
At BLAST we work at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Social Computing 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:
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
Sep 2023
Maria will be giving a talk on Neuro-Symbolic NLP at the 1st EU-UK HYBIDS meeting, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project
May 2023
Our new paper on interactive concept learning for uncovering themes in text collections was accepted to Findings of ACL 2023!
Apr 2023
BLAST members who organize for Queer in AI had their paper on Queer in AI as a case study for community-led participatory design in AI accepted to FAccT 2023