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        <meta name="author" content="Dong Nguyen" />

        <title>NLP and Society Lab @ UU</title>


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        <!--<h1>NLP and Society Lab @ UU</h1>-->
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        <p class="intro">
                  <p>Hello! We're the NLP and Society lab, part of the <a href="https://www.uu.nl/en/research/intelligent-software-systems/natural-language-processing">Natural Language Processing group</a> at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at <a href="https://www.uu.nl/">Utrecht University (NL)</a>. We're interested in: </p>

        <ul>
            <li>Analyzing and modeling the <b>relation between language and society</b> using computational methods (<a href="https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/COLI_a_00258#.V-jwiqJ95cR">computational sociolinguistics</a>).
            <li>The development of NLP methods to <b>study social phenomena </b> (NLP and computational social science). We focus
                on the analysis of online conversations and  measurement in the social sciences.
            <li>Techniques for more <b>robust and explainable</b> NLP.
      </ul>

      <h2>People</h2>

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        <a href="https://annawegmann.github.io/"><img src="pics/anna.jpg" width="120"></a><br>
        <a href="https://annawegmann.github.io/">Anna Wegmann</a><br>
        PhD student
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        <a href="https://dongnguyen.nl/"><img src="pics/dong.jpg" width="120"></a><br>
        <a href="https://dongnguyen.nl/">Dong Nguyen</a><br>
        Associate Professor</div>
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        <a href="https://www.cs.uu.nl/staff/herrewij.html"><img src="pics/elize.jpg" width="120"></a><br>
        <a href="https://www.cs.uu.nl/staff/herrewij.html">Elize Herrewijnen</a><br>
        PhD student<br>
        (co-advised with <a href="https://www.florisbex.com/">Floris Bex</a> and Jelte Mense)
        </div>
        <div class="col">
           <a href="https://www.ul.ie/dafinet/melody-sepahpour-fard"><img src="pics/melody.jpg" width="120"></a><br>
        <a href="https://www.ul.ie/dafinet/melody-sepahpour-fard">Melody Sepahpour-Fard</a><br>
        PhD student<br>
        Based at the University of Limerick<br>
        (co-advised with <a href="https://www.ul.ie/research/prof-michael-quayle">Michael Quayle</a>)
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         <div class="col">
            <a href="https://www.uu.nl/staff/SPKaszefskiYaschuk"><img src="pics/shane.jpg" width="120"></a><br>
        <a href="https://www.uu.nl/staff/SPKaszefskiYaschuk">Shane Kaszefski Yaschuk</a><br>
        PhD student<br>
       
        (co-advised with <a href="https://antalvandenbosch.nl/">Antal van den Bosch</a> and <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/massimo-poesio">Massimo Poesio</a>)
        </div>
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           <a href="https://fqixiang.github.io/"><img src="pics/qixiang.png" width="120"></a><br>
        <a href="https://fqixiang.github.io/">Qixiang Fang</a><br>
        Now postdoc<br>
        at Methodology and Statistics<br>
        (previously PhD student co-advised by Dong)
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        <div class="col">
            <a href="https://yupei.nl/"><img src="pics/yupei.jpeg" width="120"></a><br>
            <a href="https://yupei.nl/">Yupei Du</a><br>
            PhD student
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<h2>Selected recent research</h2>
<p>
<a href="https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.342/">Measuring the instability of fine-tuning</a> (ACL 2023), 
using the <a href="https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00353-7">construct validity framework to evaluate the quality of text embeddings</a> (EPJ Data Science 2022), <a href="https://aclanthology.org/2022.repl4nlp-1.26/">learning style representations</a> (Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, 2022), <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3600211.3604677">algorithmic fairness</a> (AIES 2023).
</p>
<p><b>Work in progress:</b>  <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12676">identity emergence on social media</a>,
    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01799">benchmarking LLMs using measurement theory</a>.
<p>

<h2>PhD theses</h2> 
<p>Qixiang Fang "<a href="https://research-portal.uu.nl/en/publications/leveraging-measurement-theory-for-natural-language-processing-res">Leveraging Measurement Theory for Natural Language Processing Research</a>" (2024)
</p>

<h2>Visitors</h2>
 Sanne Hoeken (2025), Gianluca Sperduti (2023)
<h2>Software</h2>
<p>See our <a href="https://github.com/nlpsoc">GitHub repository</a>!</p>

<h2>Funded projects</h2>
 <p>
ERC Stg <a href="https://datadivers-erc.github.io/">DataDivers: Diving into Data Diversity
for Fair and Robust NLP"</a> (2025-2029),
    NWO Veni (2020-2024), NWO digital society 'Digitale samenleving - de geïnformeerde burger' (2020-2024),
</p>


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