Please join us in congratulating our colleague Professor Brendan O’Connor (CICS) and his collaborator Ina Ganguli (Economics) on being awarded one of this year’s 21 ‘SPARC’ Seed Grants.

Their project, “Leveraging Innovations in Natural Language Processing to Analyze Union Contracts and Academic Labor Markets,” will combine labor economics and natural language processing, by collecting a corpus of graduate student union contracts and analyzing them with NLP methods to extract key contractual terms (e.g., wages and benefits). These legal texts pose significant linguistic challenges due to highly technical language, complex embedded clauses, deontic modality (Ash et al. 2020), etc. To address these unique challenges, the project will develop and apply large language model-based methods with manual validation.