Julia Mendelsohn

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

⚡️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...

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

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....

👋 #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!

🚀 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

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 :) 🧵

Check out Aldous’ presentation at the poster session!

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!

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.

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...

#ic2s2 I’ll be talking about this paper in one hour in Vingen 1+2!

For Prospective PhD Students I’m recruiting PhD students who will begin their degree in Fall 2026! I am an incoming assistant professor at Wisconsin-Madison’s Computer Sciences department, and my research focuses on natural langu...

I'm sadly not at #IC2S2 😭, but I will be at #ACL2025 in Vienna ☕️ next week!!

Please spread the word that I'm recruiting prospective PhD students: lucy3.notion.site/for-prospect...

Thinking about using #CSS methods to study #racism, #stereotypes or #hate speech in text? 📐

👉 Check out my first dissertation paper co-authored by @fabiennelind.bsky.social and @hajoboo.bsky.social just published in Annals of the ICA! @icahdq.bsky.social 🥳

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/annc...

We just kicked off our tutorial at #IC2S2 in beautiful Norrköping. @dustinbwright.com is currently presenting our hands-on part on automated fact checking - 📍stop by at Vingen 3-4!

I have just arrived in Norrköping for #IC2S2 and will be in Vienna next week for #ACL2025!

At IC2S2, you can find me:
1. At the AI & Misinfo Tutorial, 9am Monday (Tutorial 3)
2.Talking about metaphors, 11am Tuesday (Political Narratives I)

Assistant, Associate or Full Professor, AI & Society The Department of AI and Society (AIS) at the University at Buffalo (UB) invites candidates to apply for multiple positions as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Full Professor. The new AIS ...

UB's new Department of AI and Society is hiring faculty across ranks (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor). We’re looking for transdisciplinary scholars interested in building AI by society, for society. Start dates begin Fall 2025.

More info: www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/57734

!אַזאַ בויך

🚨New preprint on a verboten topic: social correlates of views on abortion.

Analyzing millions of geolocated tweets, we find a gender gap in abortion stance, show it widens in conservative states and identify the structural factors involved.

w/ @ashwinrao.bsky.social

📄 arxiv.org/abs/2507.05443

Jewish Languages An introduction to Jewish languages around the world, past and present, including longstanding ones, like Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Yiddish, and new ones like Jewish English and Jewish Russian.

BTW there are SO MANY Jewish languages, people

here's a resource mapping about 33 of them, from Juhuri/Judeo-Tat to Haketia to Jewish Malayalam:

Here's something very cool:

@yiddishbookcenter.bsky.social, the YIVO Institute, the National Library of IL, and the NYPL all combined forces to put like 60k digitized Yiddish books in one searchable database.

(Less useful if, like me, you don't really know Yiddish, but hella cool nonetheless:)

dark blue background. on it, there is text saying "The Delegated Act on 40.4 DATA ACCESS is here", "Delegated Act on 40.4 DATA ACCESS" is yellow, the other text is white.

📢 Big news for platform researchers across Europe and beyond:

Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.

It predicts pretty well—not just shifts in the last week, but also:

1. Who’s working an overnight shift (in our data + external validation in MIMIC)

2. Who’s working on a disruptive circadian schedule

3. How many patients has the doc seen *on the current shift*

Our critical perspective of AI efficiency is now online in Communications of the ACM!

cacm.acm.org/sustainabili...

Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem....

Paper here:
arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729

🧵 Excited to present at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025! In this paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, we introduce a novel framework for modeling narrative evolution in streaming text data. Link here: arxiv.org/abs/2409.07684

Join us bright and early tomorrow #ICWSM2025 to learn about AI and misinfo!

cc @andersgiovanni.com

📣 FUN UPDATE: We're extending the deadline by 3 days!! Submit to the NLP4Democracy workshop by June 22!

What actually happens on social media when users get access to integrated AI?🤖

In our new preprint, we present a controlled experiment testing the impact of generative AI (4 treatments + control) on a social media platform, using a representative sample of nearly 700 U.S. participants.