rob voigt

using computational methods to understand the linguistic mechanisms of social problems | NLP, socioling, discourse-pragmatics | asst prof at UC davis

[Joe Barrow @barrowjoseph]

New paper: every law in America is technically public. But not really, until now!

With @DenisPeskoff at UC Berkeley, we built a corpus of ~every publicly accessibly city and county law, and released a huge chunk of it!

2.2 million laws, you're (probably) covered in it!

🧵

[rob voigt @rfpvjr]

Jennifer Eberhardt (@StanfordSPARQ) and I have a piece out today in Vital City explaining our recent report with the @NypdMonitor and arguing for greater use of AI and computational tools for analysis of police body camera footage to build accountability and trust.

[Vital City @VitalCityNYC]

Cops record millions of hours of bodyworn camera footage every year — and most of it just sits there. Can AI help ensure it gets put to better use for analyzing policing and improving training? @rfpvjr and Jennifer Eberhardt think so. https://t.co/yv8DIK6eUP

[SPARQ @StanfordSPARQ]

A new report from Eberhardt, @tweets_on_camp, @rfpvjr, and Sutton shows how AI-powered analysis of police body-cam footage supports federal court monitoring of stop-and-frisk reforms. https://t.co/7IY9BeYIw7

[rob voigt @rfpvjr]

The Society for Computation in Linguistics (https://t.co/fWIAGqO6WX) is now nine years running focusing on computational and mathematical approaches in any area of linguistics. Our 2026 edition will be very exciting including talks from Noah Smith and Jenn Hu - hope you'll join!

[rob voigt @rfpvjr]

SCiL is welcoming authors of ACL papers with strong linguistic relevance to apply to join us for an additional non-archival poster presentation to share their work with the linguistically-minded SCiL audience. If this is you, consider submitting here! https://t.co/apsBAR5rXY

[rob voigt @rfpvjr]

For everyone working on the intersections between linguistic and computational research, consider submitting to the upcoming SCiL! We're excited that it will be co-located with ACL 2026 as a workshop, and we've received NSF funding to help cover costs.

https://t.co/fzWCNtsaXd

[Qingcheng Zeng @SteveZeng7]

📢 New Preprint 📢

💪 Current LLMs are performing quite well in pragmatic reasoning

🧐 But how do they acquire this ability?

Introducing AltPrag, a dataset motivated by the idea of "alternatives" in pragmatics to trace during which phase LLMs learn pragmatic reasoning.

[1/n]

[Qingcheng Zeng @SteveZeng7]

Echoing the great work from @dongkeun_yoon, also share our updated preprint!

🧐 Do reasoning models verbalize their confidence better than instruct models? 🧐

🧐 Does RL provide additional benefits? 🧐

We explore this using a series of instruct and reasoning models...
[1/n]

[Mina Lee @MinaLee__]

Interested in writing with AI? ✍️

Please apply to be a **postdoc** in my group through the UChicago DSI Scholars program! 🤠

Research in my group: https://t.co/cYmHB1qHno
Application: https://t.co/a70xKby6KP (review begins on Dec 6)

[Mourad Heddaya @mouradheddaya]

How do everyday narratives reveal hidden cause-and-effect patterns that shape our beliefs and behaviors?

In our paper, we propose Causal Micro-Narratives to uncover narratives from real-world data. As a case study, we characterize the narratives about inflation in news.

[Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern @IPRatNU]

This fall, IPR welcomed 14 new faculty—our largest cohort since 2016! From AI to teen brain development and workplace equity to racial disparities, these experts join 170+ faculty, fueling data-driven insights for evidence-based policymaking. https://t.co/gxYBtn1aZj

[Manling Li @ManlingLi_]

📢I am committed to be an advisor like her! I have 2-5 PhD positions and 1 postdoc position for Fall 2025 on multimodality (NLP/CV/Robotics), especially on #Reasoning, #Planning, and #Compositionality.

🌟See more at my talk slides: https://t.co/OfxrEH4uzu

[Nick Camp @tweets_on_camp]

New at PNAS Nexus: Can we use body cams to see how police-community interactions change in response to training? @rfpvjr and I analyze language from traffic stops during the Oakland Police Department’s rollout of procedural justice training. (1/7) https://t.co/wPLWHfVKe2

[Dan Jurafsky @jurafsky]

It's back-to-school time and so here's the Fall '24 release of draft chapters for Speech and Language Processing! https://t.co/pjfZsYxSk0

[Andrew Papachristos @AVPapachristos]

📣A little late in the game, but might be looking for a postdoc positions at @CornersResearch Need someone with some solid quantitative skills and wants to dig into some amazing data on Community Violence Interventions. Send email or msg if interested

[Dora Demszky @ddemszky]

Join our team! 🌱 We're looking for a motivated Project Manager to help manage research-practice partnerships with schools, teachers and educational organizations! https://t.co/WsyHu8I3ca

[Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science @CornersResearch]

Alongside @CJACTIONFUND, our analysis of 40,000+ print, digital and TV stories covering ~12,000 U.S. shootings shows:

Media sources prioritize & contextualize gun violence in majority white neighborhoods in ways not seen in communities of color. LINK - https://t.co/4yWGumPWM1

[rob voigt @rfpvjr]

@ZeerakTalat @CentreTMFutures @UoE_EFI @EdinburghNLP woohooo, huge congrats! i hope to find a time to pass through edinburgh and say hey someday!!

[SICSS-Chicago @SICSS_Chicago]

Last call for #SICSSChicago2024 submissions!🔔🔔 Come and join us in Chicago for a fantastic #ComputationalSocialScience training at Northwestern University, connect with your CSS community!👭

For the full lineup of speakers, visit our website 🔽 https://t.co/HIlgOfu6oj

[rob voigt @rfpvjr]

@mjpost @delliott I think this is completely spot on. Just from my own sample, I feel like reviews I've seen on openreview have been notably worse than on softconf, maybe in part for this reason.