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brendan o’connor

@brenocon.bsky.social
2.2K followers 50 following 191 posts

natural language processing, social science, umass, western mass brenocon.com he/him

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Reposted by brendan o’connor
Adam Visokay @avisokay.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Looking forward to the Text as Data conference on Monday at UC Berkeley! I will be presenting our new paper "Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks" which is a joint effort with Navya Mehrotra and @gligoric.bsky.social. 🧵
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Craig Messner @cmessner.bsky.social · 23h
I'm currently located in the bay area, so I'm excited to be at #tada2026 tomorrow presenting a poster on synthetic data augmentation for domain-restricted humanities language modeling and its implications for lexical leakage. I really enjoyed my last Text as Data experience, happy to see it back
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
#TADA2026 is now up on lea.ac! Full schedule, filterable by people you follow, a custom feed, and more! (This is not part of the official TADA organization, just an experiment. Try it out and let us know what you think! Also a nice way to follow along virtually if you can't attend in person!)
A screenshot from Lea showing the conference page for TADA. The program tab is selected, and presentations are filtered by "People I follow." Each resulting presentation includes the title, presenters, location, time, a topic tag, and the person (or people) presenting whom I follow.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 14h
This year UMass Amherst CICS will be hiring tenure-track faculty in natural language processing! Job ad to be posted soon. For anyone at #TADA2026 or #COLM2026 this week, I or my colleague Hamed Zamani would love to chat or answer questions about it - just say hi or send me an email to meet!
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
thanks for the statute references. it’s maddening how plainly illegal their NSF actions are. in other areas too (there are entire sections on mandating it support DEI)
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 03/10/2026
Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
the #colm2026 papers most discussed on bsky/atproto. i hadn't seen some of these papers!
A screenshot from Lea showing the papers for COLM 2026 ranked by their number of discussions. The top papers are:

LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate

AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction

Ads in AI Chatbots? An Analysis of How Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts of Interest
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
anthropomorphising organizations or even their data is kinda reasonable. "the social security (admin|database) thinks you're eligible for a penson" as for how much they have agency or can hold beliefs, LLMs are somewhere between an organization and a dataset?
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naitian @naitian.org · 24/09/2026
If you haven't yet registered for TADA 2026 on October 5th (day before COLM), registration is open to the public! Detailed schedule forthcoming, but lots of fantastic posters and talks. We even have a second half-day of lightning talks scheduled! tada2026.eventbrite.com
tada2026.eventbrite.com
Text as Data 2026
A leading forum for interdisciplinary research on the study of politics, society, and culture through computational analysis of documents.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"Cockroach Labs" sounds like parody name
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
how is any of this affected by unionization
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
at least in the mid-2010s, ppl said it was very under-resourced within google - supposedly, it was running as only a part time project of one person. it has slightly more features and stuff now, but if true that would explain lots of the issues.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
www.ulysses-31.com/theme.html
ulysses-31.com
Ulysses 31 theme
Main theme from the Ulysses 31 cartoon.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The deadline has been extended to Monday, August 3 --
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Computational Linguistics Journal @complingjournal.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
🏆The Computational Linguistics High Impact Paper Award recognises papers published in Computational Linguistics within the past 3–5 years that have already demonstrated exceptional scholarly impact. Congratulations to the authors of doi.org/10.1162/coli... #NLProc #CLjournal @chrmanning.bsky.social
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
my favorite conference
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Dallas Card @dallascard.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Text as Data has been a wonderful, long-running, non-archival workshop for empirical research at the intersection of AI and social science (especially work involving text). After a few years off, it will be happening again this year as a one-day event in early October!
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
TADA is back!!! Abstract submissions very soon, take a look!
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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Text as Data is happening at Berkeley right before COLM. Please share!
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David Jurgens @davidjurgens.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
With my ACL PC abilities, I wanted to characterize who these folks are, whether they're actually "outsiders", whether their papers are much less likely to be accepted, is this growth just LLM slop? The whole analsis is here medium.com/@jurgens_245...
medium.com
Is the ACL Rolling Review actually broken?
ARR is broken! ARR is being overwhelmed with papers from outsiders! LLM-generated slop is ruining our peer review! There are not enough…
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Comments can be submitted here - www.regulations.gov/commenton/OM... i submitted this, fwiw
The proposed rule change is a terrible idea - it would impose biased, arbitrary, political control over scientific funding, and greatly harm U.S. research, technology development, and higher education.  The extremely biased language in the document indicates the worst of intentions to implement the policy.  Also note:

 - Congress already conducts robust oversight of federal grant-making agencies, including regular reporting and testimony from agency directors.  For example, the National Science Foundation director is legally required to submit biennial reports to Congress (42 U.S. Code § 1885d), and in the past NSF directors and assistant directors have regularly given testimony to Congress.  Congressional oversight is completely sufficient to investigate all of the issues alleged here, and remedy them if they turn out to be actual issues.  Members of Congress have indeed issues critical reports in the past about particular grant-funded projects they wished scientific grant-making agencies to change, as is their proper right and authority.

[...]
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Seth Rockman @sethrockman.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Scholarly folks who have ever received federal funding: today is the deadline for public comment on proposed revisions that will decimate our national research capacity and replace expertise with political whim. Please consider throwing in your 2¢. See below for some useful links and encouragement.
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Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Monday is the deadline for public comment! The Heritage Foundation has been mobilizing its members to leave comments in favor of the rule change, so every unique comment matters (don’t use a form letter or copy/paste—similar comments are batched and treated as one).
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Étienne Ollion @eollion.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
✨ We are hiring @crestumr.bsky.social ✨ Post-doc position, up to 3 years, in a Horizon project. Profile: at the intersection of NLP & Social Sciences. More information here: shorturl.at/TxDLN 🥰 RT appreciated 🥰
shorturl.at
Post-doctoral Position: Computational Analysis of Judicial Decisions (CREST/CNRS-Ecole polytechnique) – CSS @ IP-Paris
Site web de l'axe sciences sociales computationnelles du CREST-CNRS. Cours et tutoriels pour l'analyse des données numériques en sciences sociales.
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Brandon Stewart @bstewart.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a... Now up at @knightcolumbia.org - Cosma Shalizi and myself on "AI as Social Technology." It says that AI models are really a technology of social mediation that allow humans to connect with thoughts of other humans. Short-ish thread with major points follows.
knightcolumbia.org
AI as Social Technology
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
this article is useful in posing questions about concrete numbers of hours, which I haven't seen discussed before. where will students spend 10 hours per week writing and thinking for themselves?
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
the billboards are so dystopian now the waymos are fun?
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Computational Linguistics Journal @complingjournal.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
What is cultural awareness in LLMs & what has been done in the literature for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion & methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness? This survey answers all these questions: doi.org/10.1162/COLI... #NLProc
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology. The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome. Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷
doingaidifferently.org
Doing AI Differently | Culture × AI Workshop
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
net losses in 2022, 2023, and 2024, getting worse each time. perhaps 2025 was bad as well
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
terrible (...we go there a lot)
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
More broadly, there are many research questions about AI that use findings/data from the social sciences, and since their funding is so low compared to computer science, federal funding goes a *long* way there. SBE is way smaller than CISE, but accounts for a majority of socsci funding in the U.S.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
It's crazy and terrible to eliminate SBE, and especially the idea NSF would do it in violation of Congressional direction. Even if you only cared about AI, it's important. SBE's support of opinion data has crucially helped AI alignment research; for example, data from GSS for LLM eval & modeling.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
evergreen
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
yeah ime paying for a degree is only done by masters or undergrad. teaching duties, at least substantial ones, are only done by phd students.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
that's great. but they also gave some of us (or i misled myself, wanting to believe?) the impression that their funding was more regular or less reliant on regular grant-writing cycles compared to the usual academic or research orgs. if anything it's impressive it lasted as long as it did
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
"favor real-world applications of AI over building open-source foundation models" would be moving further in the application vs research spectrum. ai2's open-source model building is in a pretty unique midpoint in that space, compared to commercial industry vs academic/basic research
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
curious about what you're doing
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
the regret was wrong hm sad all around
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
ah im wrong. in “20 years of bitext” above mercer claims he said it
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
mercer’s lifetime award talk covered similar ground but i dunno if it had much new wrt nlp history. (it had more about mercer ofc which is why political reporters cite it…)
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
also see the “20 years of bitext” transcript waypost.net/bitext
waypost.net
Twenty Years of Bitext
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
other ibm ppl claimed that was apocryphal
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Many rooms were like this at Sofia's National Palace of Culture (ACL 2013). Sadly I didn't photograph the best one, which i remember as a wall mural of a worker being crucified right above the projector screen
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
deleted a QT discussing a shockingly sexist email written by roger schank. these people were so evil just seeing their emails is not good
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
(i never met her - i think she retired before i started here.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_L...
en.wikipedia.org
Wendy Lehnert - Wikipedia
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brendan o’connor @brenocon.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
to be clear, in this instance the former student went on to a 30 years or so career as a professor, including recognition as a AAAI Fellow. bsky.app/profile/bren...
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