Sachita Nishal

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar?

Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly.

A few examples in thread ↴

Check out the camera-ready version of our ACL Findings paper ("Taxonomizing Representational Harms using Speech Act Theory") to learn more!!! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00928

CONGRATULATIONS!!!🥳

columnar joints in a japanese waterfall. these are rocks carved out when water eroded through the cooled lava.

happy birthday! it is also my birthday! here is a photo of columnar joints in a japanese waterfall that I saw last week--rocks formed when water cut through the cooled lava from a volcano!

1. On Saturday, @mnlee.bsky.social will present our work on designing for agency in LLM-infused writing support tools for journalists at the Tools for Thought workshop.

Lead author @sachnishal.bsky.social will be nearby at her own workshop on news + HCI!

ai-tools-for-thought.github.io/workshop/

sometimes when i'm writing a sentence i really like it feels like i'm playing the piano

Remember this @neuripsconf.bsky.social workshop paper? We spent the past month writing a newer, better, longer version!!! You can find it online here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00561

Screenshot of Google docs generative AI agent asking me to Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate, More formal.

Holy moly. I'm trying to write an academic paper, and nearly every application I'm using is not only offering Generative AI as an option for writing, but *pushing it* -- pervading the design to the point where a simple misclick would make my content AI-generated. Here's why that's a problem. 🧵

News Futures @ CHI 2025 Welcome to the News Futures Workshop @ CHI 2025! The ways in which news is produced and consumed is constantly reshaped by technological change—today, this takes the form of AI integration in newsroom...

Incredibly amped to co-organize this #CHI2025 workshop on the future of news and HCI 📰📺🌐 Join us in exploring how HCI can support the production, verification and dissemination of trustworthy news in a changing world!

🔗 Details: sites.google.com/view/newsfut...
⏳ Deadline: Feb 20, 2025 (AoE)

By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these, including “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “100% Lounge,” “Bossa Nova Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz,” “Deep Sleep,” “Morning Stretch,” and “Detox,” were nearly entirely made up of PFC.

can connect playlists meant to deliver indifferent content (e.g. "bossa nova dinner") to the spurious AI-generated genres individualized for each user in Spotify Wrapped; these "genres" have no social meaning and can't be learned or shared, only experienced through more streaming

It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance Progress in NLP is increasingly measured through benchmarks; hence, contextualizing progress requires understanding when and why practitioners may disagree about the validity of benchmarks. We develop...

Seeing cool works on metrology and measurement modeling for NLP!

So I wanted to port over the thread our ACL 2023 Findings paper (arxiv.org/abs/2305.09022) on conceptualizations of NLP tasks and measurements of performance! Work with Eric Yuan, @haldaume3.bsky.social, and Su Lin Blodgett. (1/n)

was mildly obsessed with this genre of ad all summer and took a bunch of photos for giggles. I feel they exemplify well this idea of "AI as floating signifier" from Suchman (2023), since they "suggest[s] a specific referent but work[s] to escape definition in order to maximize its suggestive power"

Feel like "fix the motion smoothing" should be replaced by "explain that ChatGPT isn't a search engine" when going home for the holidays now

Photo shows a sheet of US postage stamps each printed with an identical portrait of the writer Ursula K LeGuin.

PSA, your local post office probably has Ursula K LeGuin stamps or you can order them by mail.

I understand—thank you for taking the time to explain, this is really insightful!

I understand! do you find that companies try to automate that junior work away, or is it something different? your initial post brought to mind the writers strike from last year and companies wanting writers to edit AI-generated first drafts and such, wondering if there are parallels in games?

hi! would you be open to speculating or sharing resources on why junior roles have become so rare in video games? I’ve heard of similar concerns about junior/trainee in other creative domains and am trying to get a sense of what drives this shift?

The Premature Death of Physical Media — and the Cult Home Video Labels Keeping It Alive Matt Desiderio isn’t sure how he feels about me taking photos of his movie collection. It’s not that he isn’t proud of it — quite the contrary. Falling off the shelves in his living room, carrying ove...

This, from 2015, was another longread for Flavorwire, on the importance of physical media. Another ongoing hobby horse of mine! I've really just been writing and yelling about the same things for a decade!! www.flavorwire.com/535883/the-p...

The best writers in the world.

go.bsky.app/8fxDPpA

I love how I just discovered I have a folder called "READ NOW!!!!" and I just scroll pass it. Untouched since October last year 🤣

I have a whole Zotero tag dedicated to this, nothing there has been read in months either hahahah

Lines on an 1893 map of London showing how various characters travel in the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Red Headed League'.

Earlier this year, I decided to try tracing character journeys from each Sherlock Holmes story on London's 1893 Ordnance Survey #maps. It's great fun. As the street structure has remained largely the same, you can sometimes use ORS tools for routing between points. This one's the Red Headed League.

this is incredibly cool! really nice to be able to measure facetime of characters as opposed to just presence/absence!

Have finally coded a Small Language model. Responds to any input with “wow, that’s a lot of words” and then shuts down

A flyer recruiting participants for a study being conducted by Microsoft Research, UChicago, and Northwestern University.

📣 Attention freelance science & tech journalists! 🔬🧪💻

We're recruiting participants for a study about how generative AI could reshape journalists' work. Join us for a 60-80 mins interview and share your thoughts on generative AI tools that can support pitch writing! (1/3)

Clear your mind of questions Today: Miles Klee, author of the novel Ivyland and culture writer at Rolling Stone. Issue No. 145 11 Things About Zombo.com Miles Klee 11 Things About Zombo.com by Miles Klee This story is pa...

My latest at @flaminghydra.com —for our "Lost Internet" series—is a meditation on the zen of Zombocom:

For more details, contact me or Jenn Wortman Vaughan (jenn@microsoft.com) from Microsoft Research. The study also involves our collaborators Mina Lee (UChicago) and @ndiakopoulos.bsky.social (Northwestern)!

#ScienceJournalism #GenerativeAI #ScienceWriting #Journalism #HCI