My primary research areas are in computational semantics and computational social science.

This work involves developing artificial intelligence methods to automatically measure constructs from linguistic semantics and pragmatics, cognitive science, and social psychology in large-scale text datasets, which I then put to use in answering questions about people and society.

At the same time, I believe that the way people use language can also inform theoretical understandings of the meanings and functions of words.

Some examples of recent projects: how journalists use affirming and doubt-casting discourse in their coverage of climate change; how citing evidence, and being polite and non-assertive about it, is key to changing minds in online arguments; how and why the meaning of adverbs like literally and insanely has changed over the course of the past two centuries; how new word meanings emerge and old ones become obsolete.

New: you can find the slides for my IC2S2 '23 talk here.
You can find the slides for my dissertation oral here.

I am also interested in text data science and digital humanities more broadly, resulting in these unofficially published blogposts.