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Julia Mendelsohn

@jmendelsohn2.bsky.social

4.2K followers 730 following 54 posts

Incoming Asst Prof @UMD Info College, currently postdoc @UChicago. NLP, computational social science, political communication, linguistics. Past: Info PhD @UMich, CS + Lx @Stanford. Interests: cats, Yiddish, talking to my cats in Yiddish.

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Julia Mendelsohn @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social · Feb 20

New preprint!
Metaphors shape how people understand politics, but measuring them (& their real-world effects) is hard.

We develop a new method to measure metaphor & use it to study dehumanizing metaphor in 400K immigration tweets Link: bit.ly/4i3PGm3

#NLP #NLProc #polisky #polcom #compsocialsci
🐦🐦

Screenshot of top half of first page of paper. The paper is titled: "When People are Floods: Analyzing Dehumanizing Metaphors in Immigration Discourse with Large Language Models". The authors are Julia Mendelsohn (University of Chicago) and Ceren Budak (University of Michigan). The top right corner contains a visual showing the sentence "They want immigrants to pour into and infest this country". The caption says: Figure 1: Dehumanizing sentence likening immigrants to the source domain concepts of Water and Vermin via the words "pour" and "infest".

The abstract text on the left reads: Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on social media. Grounded in qualitative social science research, we identify seven concepts evoked in immigration discourse (e.g. "water" or "vermin"). We propose and evaluate a novel technique that leverages both word-level and document-level signals to measure metaphor with respect to these concepts. We then study the relationship between metaphor, political ideology, and user engagement in 400K US tweets about immigration. While conservatives tend to use dehumanizing metaphors more than liberals, this effect varies widely across concepts. Moreover, creature-related metaphor is associated with more retweets, especially for liberal authors. Our work highlights the potential for computational methods to complement qualitative approaches in understanding subtle and implicit language in political discourse.

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Julia Mendelsohn @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social · 2d

I will be at #COLM2025 this week, and would love to connect with folks interested in applications (and critiques) of language modeling in social science research!

And join us for the NLP4Democracy workshop on Friday!

sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e...

#NLP #NLProc #LLM #ComputationalSocialScience

NLP 4 Democracy - COLM 2025

sites.google.com

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Reposted by Julia Mendelsohn

Arianna Pera @ariannapera.bsky.social · 6d

How does online communication adapt to organizational context?

In a new pre-print with @cerenbudak.bsky.social and @lajello.bsky.social, we study US labor unions’ Facebook use of discourse frames around wins and losses in representation elections. 🧵

📖 arxiv.org/abs/2510.01757

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Myra Cheng @myra.bsky.social · 5d

AI always calling your ideas “fantastic” can feel inauthentic, but what are sycophancy’s deeper harms? We find that in the common use case of seeking AI advice on interpersonal situations—specifically conflicts—sycophancy makes people feel more right & less willing to apologize.

Screenshot of paper title: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence

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David Bamman @dbamman.bsky.social · 16d

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

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Andy Halterman @ahalterman.bsky.social · 20d

Very excited that my paper with @katakeith.bsky.social is now out in @polanalysis.bsky.social. We investigate whether LLMs actually follow the instructions/definitions provided in codebooks, propose some diagnostics, and release a new evaluation dataset.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Codebook LLMs: Evaluating LLMs as Measurement Tools for Political Science Concepts | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core

Codebook LLMs: Evaluating LLMs as Measurement Tools for Political Science Concepts

www.cambridge.org

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Katie Carmichael @drkatcarm.bsky.social · 28d

::slowly stands while clapping::

Image of labubu doll labeled labubu next to image of spiky labubu doll labeled lakiki

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Lucy Lu Wang @lucylw.bsky.social · 28d

Pls help spread the word: We are hiring! 🌲☕✨
@ischool.uw.edu is recruiting two tenure-track assistant profs in AI. Areas include human-AI collaboration, AI & society, comp social science, NLP, and AI applications.

Apply by Nov 15, 2025: apply.interfolio.com/171020

Happy to answer questions!

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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Jacob Eisenstein is at CoLM @jacobeisenstein.bsky.social · Aug 25

found some books at my parents’ house

automatic translation: autonomy by dr. b hoffman

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Dustin Wright @dustinbwright.com · Aug 25

🎉 Our work on attribution in summarization is now accepted to #EMNLP2025 main! 🎉

"Unstructured Evidence Attribution for Long Context Query Focused Summarization"

w/ @zainmujahid.me , Lu Wang, @iaugenstein.bsky.social , and @davidjurgens.bsky.social

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · Aug 21

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357

Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

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David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · Aug 15

Apply for funding to work with me and Gord at Cornell!

Gordon Pennycook @gordpennycook.bsky.social · Aug 15

Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla...

It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year

Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline

Klarman Fellowships

The Klarman Fellowships in the College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kin...

as.cornell.edu

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Jessi Grieser @jessgrieser.com · Aug 15

UMich Ling is hiring for a cluster hire position in AI and Linguistics! Come work in a fabulous department with great grad students, supportive colleagues, and one overly school-spirited nut who will tell you where all the fun stuff is on campus.

apply.interfolio.com/171006

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

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James M. Zumel Dumlao @jamesmzd.bsky.social · Aug 14

Now published at PNAS ‼️ w/ @innovation.bsky.social

How does peer reviewer diversity affect fairness in peer review and the direction of published science? We find a "geographical representation bias" in 60 STEM journals published by @ioppublishing.bsky.social.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Title and author info of PNAS paper linked

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sohyeon hwang @s0hw.bsky.social · Aug 12

I'm co-organizing #CSCW NE, an in-person regional gathering for people in Northeast America, alongside some folks from Stevens, Rutgers, and Princeton. If you want to come hang out (especially if you can't make it out to the full conference in Bergen this year), RSVP at cscw-ne.hci.social!

A faded etching of the Hudson River from Hoboken is overlaid with the following text: CSCW Northeast 2025, in-person regional gathering. Friday, October 3, 2025, 10AM-4:30PM at University Center Complex, Stevens Institute of Technology. RSVP: cscw-ne.hci.social

The logos of HCI at Stevens, Princeton HCI, and Rutgers University are on the right-hand side.

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William J. Brady @williambrady.bsky.social · Aug 12

Are you interested in topics related to conflict and intergroup relations *broadly construed*? Come join us as a postdoc in the Dispute Research Research Center! This position is up to 3 years, comes with your own research funding, and a phenomenal network of past DRRC postdocs.

Dispute Resolution Research Center @drrc-kellogg.bsky.social · Aug 11

Apply now for Kellogg’s DRRC Postdoc Fellowship, which supports outstanding research in conflict and cooperation, offering dedicated time for scholarship, access to exceptional resources, and a vibrant academic community. Deadline: Nov 1.
t.co/UDZwJCqDw5

https://tinyurl.com/drrcpostdoc2025

t.co

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Marianne Aubin Le Quéré @mariannealq.bsky.social · Aug 2

Does your work explore mis/disinformation, scams, hate speech, or other forms of harmful information online?

We are convening a CSCW workshop to bring together a global community focused on information disorder. We welcome 2-6 page submissions, due August 8th.

Cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app

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Xiaoyan Bai @elenal3ai.bsky.social · Jul 31

⚡️Ever asked an LLM-as-Marilyn Monroe about the 2020 election? Our paper calls this concept incongruence, common in both AI and how humans create and reason.
🧠Read my blog to learn what we found, why it matters for AI safety and creativity, and what's next: cichicago.substack.com/p/concept-in...

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Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · Jul 30

Several application deadlines tomorrow (July 31!): financial assistance, volunteers, and childcare financial assistance.

Also, we are proud to announce the COLM Children's Program -- our affordable (and fun!) program for children

All linked from colmweb.org

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Dallas Card @dallascard.bsky.social · Jul 29

I am delighted to share our new #PNAS paper, with @grvkamath.bsky.social @msonderegger.bsky.social and @sivareddyg.bsky.social, on whether age matters for the adoption of new meanings. That is, as words change meaning, does the rate of adoption vary across generations? www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

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Indira Sen @indiiigo.bsky.social · Jul 29

👋 #ACL2025NLP 🇦🇹 @marlutz.bsky.social and I are presenting our poster on demographic representativeness of LLMs today!

🕦 10:30-12:00
📍 Hall X5 (board 1 or 14 according to different sources 🧐)

Here’s the paper on ACL anthology: aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

Drop by!

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Sebastian Stier @sebstier.bsky.social · Jul 29

🚀 New postdoc position for Platform Data & Computational Social Science
Join us to drive @gesis.org' efforts around the Digital Services Act (DSA) and conduct research with online platform data
💼 TV-L EG 14 | Location: Cologne
📌 Apply now: www.gesis.org/en/institute...
#DSA #CSS #DataScience

Details

GESIS Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

www.gesis.org

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Paul Röttger @ ACL @paul-rottger.bsky.social · Jul 28

Very excited about all these papers on sociotechnical alignment & the societal impacts of AI at #ACL2025.

As is now tradition, I made some timetables to help me find my way around. Sharing here in case others find them useful too :) 🧵

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chenhaotan.bsky.social @chenhaotan.bsky.social · Jul 27

Check out Aldous’ presentation at the poster session!

Mingxuan (Aldous) Li @itea1001.bsky.social · Jul 27

#ACL2025 Poster Session 1 tomorrow 11:00-12:30 Hall 4/5!

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Julia Mendelsohn @jmendelsohn2.bsky.social · Jul 27

Had a great time at #IC2S2 and now on to #ACL2025! I will be...

1. Talking about metaphor/framing/dehumanization (again lol) in Poster Session 4, Wed 11am
2. On a panel at #Argmining2025 , Thu 5:15pm
3. Presenting a survey of antisemitism research in NLP at #WOAH2025, Fri 1:40pm

Let's chat!

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naitian @naitian.org · Jul 23

I'm thrilled to be doing an oral presentation on "Culture is not Trivia" at #ACL2025 next Wednesday 7/30, as well as participating in the human-centered NLP panel afterwards!

(thanks also @lauraknelson.bsky.social for the shoutout in her #ic2s2 keynote today!)

aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

A poster for "Culture is not Trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" which takes the form of a flow-chart. The central question, and the starting point of the flow chart, is "What is culture in cultural NLP?"

An arrow is labeled "wait, so what's cultural NLP?" This leads to a block explaining that the goals of cultural NLP are described in section 2 of the paper. They include inclusivity, depth, discerning, and adaptiveness.

That leads to an arrow that says "that sounds great!". But there are recurring challenges in this kind of work! Section 3 surveys some of these: a discomfort around the proxies being chosen, a lack of coverage, and a lack of dynamicity.

That in turn leads to an arrow labeled "Hm, sounds like we need to figure out..." and it leads back to the main question: "What is culture in cultural NLP?"

A final arrow extends below this block: "Well, who's to say, really?"

This points to sociocultural linguistics. Section 4 explores how other disciplines, like sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis have faced similar challenges in the past. Section 4.2 gives an overview of sociocultural linguistics, which is a set of principles tying together some convergent themes: emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness.

One arrow extends from this asking, "what's that have to do with cultural NLP?" Section 5 gives a case study of how indexicality clarifies how to think about stereotypies in the context of mining cultual knowledge from the web.

Another arrow says "How can I build safe NLP systems?" Section 6.2 explores how localization can serve as a useful model from building culturally aware technologies because it forces developers to define culture explicitly and tractably.

Finally, an arrow asks "how can I study culture with NLP methods?" Section 6.1 lays out theoretically motivated directions for future empirical and theoretical work in computationally modeling culture.

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