Maria Antoniak


default


About me

I’m a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI on the Semantic Scholar team. My research is in natural language processing and cultural analytics. I’m interested in using computational methods to study stories, healthcare, and online communities and in measuring the reliability of NLP tools when used for social datasets and human research questions.

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.

My past work has examined how postpartum people share and frame their birth experiences, how online book reviewers use and write about genres, and why word vector similarities require additional stability tests when used to measure biases.


News

Nov 2023 Presenting our work on values in online book reviews at Text as Data in Amherst
Oct 2023 Invited to speak at the Quantitative Social Science Colloquium (QSSC) at Princeton University
Oct 2023 Invited to speak at the Machine Learning and Friends Lunch at UMass Amherst
Aug 2023 Teaching a course at the Intelligence, Data, Ethics and Society (IDEAS) summer program organized by Northeastern and Harvard
Jul 2023 Our paper on online discussions of contraception was accepted at ICWSM 2024
Jul 2023 Invited to speak at ETS AI Labs about my work on stability and reliability of bias measurements
Jul 2023 Presenting our demo for Riveter at ACL in Toronto
Jun 2023 New blog post presenting the risks of chatbots and writing assistants to everyday users
Jun 2023 Co-organizing a tutorial at FAccT in Chicago
Apr 2023 Invited to speak and run an interactive session at the AAMC Maternal Health Equity Workshop
Apr 2023 Invited to speak at the Computational Formalism Workshop at Dartmouth
Apr 2023 Attending the Narrative Medicine Workshop at Columbia
Jan 2023 Teaching NLP for Cultural Analytics at UW Linguistics
Oct 2022 Presenting a poster at Text as Data (TADA) in NYC
Sept 2022 Invited to speak at the McGill Narrative & Society Conference in Montreal
Sept 2022 Speaking virtually at the Monash-Warwick-Zurich Text-as-Data Workshop
Jul 2022 Invited to speak at the Workshop on Narrative Understanding at NAACL 2022
Jun 2022 Visiting ETH Zurich as a Summer Fellow with Elliott Ash's group


Teaching, outreach, and resources

I 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, 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 a builder and maintainer for some cultural analytics tools:


Media


Other things