Su-Lin Blodgett, a PhD student in the College of Infomation and Computer Sciences, was recently featured in a UMass news aarticle “Data Science Student Aims to Improve Inclusion of African-American English”, which discusses her recent ACL paper: https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/data-science-student-aims-improve

It cites Blodgett as saying that:

By expanding the linguistic coverage of NLP tools to include minority and colloquial dialects, the thoughts and ideas of more individuals and groups can be included in areas such as opinion and sentiment analysis,

Blodgett’s research on the use of African American English on Twitter has been done in collaboration with our own Lisa Green as well as Brendan O’Connor of CICS. The ACL paper was in collaboration with undergraduate Johnny Tian-Zhen Wei and O’Connor.