Selected Professional Activities and Related Information

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? — Logan Pearsall Smith

Research awards and citations

• Test-of-time award, 25-years-back version, ACL 2024 (one awarded), for "Measures of Distributional Similarity".
  Citation: In the paper, the author studies distributional similarity measures to improve probability estimation for unseen co-occurrences. The paper provides an empirical comparison of various distributional similarity measures, including cosine similarity, Jaccard's coefficient, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence, while also introducing a new similarity metric called the skew divergence. The evaluation methodology employed and the characteristic for classifying similarity functions have had a long-lasting impact on research in the statistical approach to natural language processing. Many of the metrics studied are still frequently used today. [paper, test-of-time talk slides]
• Best paper award, ACL 2023 (one of 3), for "Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor "Understanding" Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest", Hessel, Marasović, Hwang, Lee, Da, Zellers, Mankoff, Choi.
  Citation: "This is an interesting future direction on computational humor that combines a nice new dataset and task that should pose a hard challenge for models. This paper is highly creative, excellently written, technically sophisticated, and rigorously evaluated by both benchmarks and humans. The resources produced from this paper will likely inspire many future studies. It was a true joy to read." [paper]
• ACM Fellow, 2018 (one of 56). Citation: "For contributions to natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and computational social science".
• 2018 Test-of-Time Paper on Computational Linguistics, 2002-2012, for "Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques", Pang, Lee and Vaithyanathan. The other winners: the BLEU paper, by Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward and Wei-Jing Zhu; and Discriminative training methods for hidden Markov Models: Theory and experiments with perceptron algorithms, by Michael Collins.
  Citation text
• ACL Fellow, elected 2017. Citation: “For significant wide-ranging contributions to the rigorous analysis of human social communication and for advancing the field of computational social science”. The other 2017 Fellows: Regina Barzilay, Ralph Grishman, Diane Litman, Fernando Pereira, and Stuart Shieber.
• Best paper award, IJCAI 2016 NLP Meets Journalism workshop, joint with Liye Fu and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil (one award given out)
• AAAI Fellow, elected 2013. Citation: “For significant contributions to natural language processing, including in sentiment analysis and in drawing connections to the social sciences.” (eight 2013 Fellows overall)
• Faculty Fellow, Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS), Fall 2008 (Cornell press release)
• Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship (established by a gift from Ronay and Richard Menschel; for tenured faculty across Cornell), 2007. The other recipients: Piet Brouwer (Physics), Dan Luo (BEE), and Ted Eisenberg (Law).
• Best paper award, HLT-NAACL 2004, joint with Regina Barzilay (one award given out)
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 2002
   
  
• Top-scoring system (led basically single-handedly by Tianze Shi) overall and top on 16 of 17 languages at the IWPT 2021 shared task on parsing into enhanced universal dependencies
• “50+ women to follow in computational social science”, SAGE Ocean, 2018
• (Given the ever-present problems of publication alignment, data cleaning, and the like, this should be taken with a major grain of salt) Spot 7 on the AMiner's 2016 list of most influential scholars in NLP
• "Five data scientists to watch", People Pattern post, 2014
• "Top picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004", Technology Research News, joint with Regina Barzilay

Teaching and curriculum-reform awards

• James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, 2014
• Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award, 2009
  Info on the CS major curriculum reform; Cornell entry in the CRA-E report 2010 White Paper on Creating Environments for Computational Researcher Education
  The other recipients in 2009: Eric Alani (Molecular Biology and Genetics), Marianella Casasola (Human Development), David Delchamps (ECE)
• James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, 2002
• Stephen '57 and Marilyn Miles Excellence in Teaching Award, 1999

Service award

• ACL Distinguished Service Award, 2021: announcement; acceptance remarks: slides, video

Selected press mentions

• LLMs "understanding" New Yorker cartoons paper: Psychology Today
• "Winning arguments" paper: The New York Times (December 2019). Also Slate, The Telegraph, New York Magazine, The Daily Mail
• Gender and tennis interview-questions paper: The New York Times (September 2017)
• Phrasing effects on retweet rates paper: New York Times (July 2014), CBS News, Washington Post, Fast Company, Daily Mail
• What makes a movie quote memorable paper: NPR's All Things Considered (April 2012), The New York Times, The Toronto Star, Christian Science Monitor, NBC's Today Show, The Huffington Post, The Independent, New Scientist, GQ (September 2023)
• Linguistic echoing in movie scripts paper: Nature's news (June 2011), New Scientist, reproduced in (the online version of) Scientific American
• Paraphrasing via multiple-sequence alignment paper: The New York Times (December 2003)

Selected offices

• Secretary, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2004-2005, 2006-2007
• Program Chair, EMNLP 2001 (co-chair: Donna Harman)
• Chair, NAACL Nominating Committee, 2010

Editorial positions

• Co-editor-in-chief, Transactions of the ACL (TACL), 2014-2016, 2017-2019
• Editorial Boards: JAIR, 2005-2008; associate editor, July 2008-2011, 2011-2014, advisory board, 2014-2017; TACL, action editor, 2012-; Machine Learning Journal, 2001-2004, 2006-2008, 2008-2011; Computational Linguistics, 2000-2002

Advisory Boards

• Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2021-2025
• Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science, the University of Edinburgh, 2018-2020
• Penn State "Big Data Social Science" IGERT, 2012-2016

Selected invited conference talks and tutorials

• NeurIPS 2016 tutorial: “Natural language processing for computational social science”, with Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
• NAACL 2015: “Big data pragmatics!”, or, “Putting the ACL in computational social science”, or, if you think these title alternatives could turn people on, turn people off, or otherwise have an effect, this talk might be for you
• EU-US Frontiers of Engineering symposium, 2013: “I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that”: Linguistics, Statistics, and Natural Language Processing in the Big Data Era [pdf]
• South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, 2011: Sentiment of two women: Sentiment analysis and social media (joint with Bo Pang)
• ICWSM 2009: A tempest: Or, On the flood of interest in sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and the computational treatment of subjective languag
• AAAI 2008: ditto
• UAI 2004: What is the matter? Explorations in document classification
• Fundamentals of Computer Science symposium, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, 2001: “I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that”: Linguistics, statistics, and natural language processing in 2001

Some interdisciplinary and "other-discipline"-ary activities

• Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Faculty Affiliate, 2018-
• The 11th Triennial Invitational Choice Symposium, “Wisdom for words: Insight from language and textual analysis” workshop, 2019.
• Computational Social Science Workshop, University of Chicago, 2018.
• Behavioral insights from text, the Wharton school, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
• Beyond the lab: Using big data to discover principles of cognition, the 2017 Psychonomic Society Leading Edge workshop.
• Roundtable on Conferences and Publishing in Text as Data: An exchange of disciplinary experiences, Text as Data 2016
• Retreat organized by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan at Tarrytown, NY, 2013
• New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science (with Northwestern and the London School of Economics), 2012 (my notes)
• Emory University's Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods, year on Big Data, kick-off speaker
• Text Analysis and the Law, workshop sponsored by the UNC Political Science department, November 2011
• New Directions in Text Analysis, conference sponsored by the Program for Text Research, Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, May 2010
• Cornell Workshop on Grammar Induction, May 2010
• Text as Data, conference at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern, March 2010
• Automated Content Analysis and the Law, NSF-sponsored workshop, August 2009
• New Directions in Text Analysis, conference sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, May 2009
• Faculty fellow, Institute for the Social Sciences, Fall 2008 (see above)

Some outreach activities

• Fake News, Language Analysis, and Online Influence: second panel in the Syracuse University Newhouse School Social Media and Democracy seminar series, 2018.
• Seventh annual Arnold Family Lecture at the IMA, 2016: “ Linguistics, Statistics, and Artificial Intelligence in the Big Data Era”
• Women in Machine Learning workshop, 2015, invited talk: “Big data pragmatics!”, or, “Putting the ACL in computational social science”, or, if you think these title alternatives could turn people on, turn people off, or otherwise have an effect, this talk might be for you”
• Cornell evening summer lecture series, 2012: “I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that”: Can computers really understand what we say? [slides]
• Panelist, forum on advancing in academia, Women's Institute in Summer Enrichment, organized by the Team for Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST), 2008
• Co-organizer, North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NAMCLO 2007, NACLO 2008, NACLO 2009), Ithaca competition
• Speaker, Tompkins County Senior Center “Senior Circuit” program, 2003 (Talk title: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that": Linguistics, Statistics, and Natural Language Processing circa 2001)
• Panelist, Tompkins County Community Forum on Frankenstein and the Future of Artificial Intelligence, 2002
• Boston University Association for Women in Mathematics discussion, careers after an undergraduate math major, 1995