about me

I am a senior researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group at Microsoft Research Montréal. I’m broadly interested in examining the social and ethical implications of natural language processing technologies; I develop approaches for anticipating, measuring, and mitigating harms arising from language technologies, focusing on the complexities of language and language technologies in their social contexts, and on supporting NLP practitioners in their ethical work. I’ve also worked on using NLP approaches to examine language variation and change (computational sociolinguistics), for example developing models to identify language variation on social media.

I was previously a postdoctoral researcher at MSR Montréal. I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working in the Statistical Social Language Analysis Lab under the guidance of Brendan O’Connor, where I was also supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I received my B.A. in mathematics from Wellesley College. I interned at Microsoft Research New York in summer 2019, where I had the fortune of working with Solon Barocas, Hal Daumé III, and Hanna Wallach.

recent news

June 2022: I gave keynotes at the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP.

May 2022: Delighted to be continuing at MSR Montréal as a senior researcher!

May 2022: Honored to have served as ethics co-chair for ACL 2022.

May 2022: Our paper exploring NLG practitioners’ evaluation assumptions and practices, led by Kaitlyn Zhou, has been accepted to NAACL 2022.

May 2022: Q. Vera Liao, Alexandra Olteanu, and I co-organized a CHI panel: “Responsible Language Technologies: Foreseeing and Mitigating Harms”.

Dec. 2021: Honored to have been named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2022.

Dec. 2021: The second edition of our workshop bridging HCI and NLP will take place at NAACL (co-organized with Hal Daumé III, Michael Madaio, Ani Nenkova, Brendan O’Connor, Hanna Wallach, and Qian Yang).

May 2021: Two papers accepted to ACL 2021: a paper investigating four benchmark datasets for measuring stereotyping, and a paper examining race, racism, and anti-racism in NLP.

Apr. 2021: We co-organized a workshop at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing (with Michael Madaio, Brendan O’Connor, Hanna Wallach, and Qian Yang).

Oct. 2020: I started a postdoc at Microsoft Research!

Sept. 2020: I defended my thesis virtually!

Apr. 2020: Our paper examining work on bias in NLP has been accepted to ACL 2020.