Maria Antoniak


I’m a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI, where I work in natural language processing and cultural analytics. In Fall 2025, I will start as an Assistant Professor in the CS Department at CU Boulder.

I earned my PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, where I was advised by David Mimno. I have a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington and have worked as a research intern at places like Microsoft Research FATE, Twitter Cortex, Facebook Core Data Science, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I’ve been recognized as a “Rising Star” in both computer science and data science.


Research Interests

📐 Measuring the Reliability of NLP Tools: I’ve shown that popular NLP methods ported to new domains can result in surprising instabilities and biases: for example, word vector similarities require additional stability tests when used to measure social biases. I’m generally interested in datasets, domains/genres, and probing of data-centric methods.

✨ Modeling Narratives: I’ve used NLP models to study storytelling, investigating questions like where people tell stories online and narrative pathways and framing in healthcare stories. With collaborators in the humanities, I’ve also studied narrative reception, examining topics like how readers of different genres write book reviews and what the “classics” mean to Goodreads reviewers.

⚕️ Person and Story-Centered Healthcare: I’ve worked with interdisciplinary teams of clinicians and researchers at Microsoft, Facebook, the Hospital for General Surgery NY, and the Association of American Medical Colleges. My research has focused on using NLP technologies to examine people’s healthcare experiences: for example, how postpartum people share and frame their childbirth narratives and how an online community collaboratively makes sense of difficult healthcare decisions. I’ve also built a public facing set of foundations of responsible NLP use for maternal health equity.


News and Upcoming Talks

October 2024 Presenting our work on sensitive disclosures in human-chatbot conversations at COLM in Philadelphia
Fall 2024 Spending a year at the Pioneer AI Center at the University of Copenhagen working on narrative research
August 2024 Presenting our work on narrative detection at ACL in Bangkok
June 2024 New preprint about poetry evaluation and memorization
June 2024 Keynote talk at the NLP+CSS Workshop at NAACL in Mexico City
June 2024 Presenting our work on guiding principles for NLP for maternal healthcare at FAccT in Rio
June 2024 Our work on sensemaking in online discussions of contraception will be presented at ICWSM
June 2024 Invited talk at the Symposium on LLMs for xPhi in Krakow, as part of the European Experimental Philosophy Conference
May 2024 Keynote talk at the Workshop on Reference, Framing, and Perspective at LREC-COLING in Torino


Teaching, Outreach, and Resources

I designed and taught NLP for Cultural Analytics for the Linguistics department at the University of Washington in Winter 2023.

I’m one of the lead organizers for AI for Humanists, a series of tutorials and workshops that guide interdisciplinary researchers in using large language models. In addition to our independent tutorials, I’ve led or co-led sessions at ICWSM, FAccT, Bell Labs, and the popular NLP+CSS 201 tutorial series. I’ve also taught similar public-facing courses for the Hertie School in Berlin, the Brown Institute at Columbia, and the IDEAS Summer School at Northeastern.

I’m the lead builder and maintainer for some cultural analytics tools:


Media


Recent Service


Other Things