Hi, I am an assistant professor at Utrecht University.
Previously I was
a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.
I was also affiliated with Edinburgh University.
I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Twente.
I received a master's degree from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Twente.
I have interned at Facebook (fall 2011),
Microsoft Research (fall 2013),
and Google (summer 2014).
In fall 2015 I visited Georgia Tech.
I'm heading the NLP and Society Lab @ UU.
I'm a member of the Utrecht Young Academy.
Research
I work in Natural Language Processing. I'm especially interested in computational text analysis for research questions from the social sciences. Most of my research focuses on social media data.
- Computational sociolinguistics: The emerging research area of computational sociolinguistics (Nguyen et al. Computational Linguistics 2016) aims to model and analyze language variation and change using computational approaches.
Recent (selected) articles: automatic detection of semantic change (Shoemark and Liza et al., EMNLP 2019) and analysis of dialect variation in social media (Nguyen, book chapter to appear 2020).
- NLP for computational social science: The development of NLP tools to study social phenomena, often in close collaboration with researchers from the social sciences.
Recent (selected) articles: How we do things with words: Analyzing text as social and cultural data (Nguyen et al. Frontiers in AI 2020).
- Explainable NLP: To make NLP systems that are transparent and/or explainable.
Recent articles: evaluation of local explanations (Nguyen, NAACL 2018).
Tutorials
- Together with Vincent Traag I organized a 4TU seminar on Computational Social Science, 7 April, 2017.
- I gave a tutorial on NLP for computational social science at the Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK) conference (2017). [webpage] [slides]
- I gave a tutorial on Computational Sociolinguistics at the 3rd International Conference on Computational Social Science (2017).
Events
- Digital diasporas: Interdisciplinary perspectives conference in London, 2019.
- Lorentz workshop: New methods in computational sociolinguistics, Leiden 2018
- Computational sociolinguistics workshop at NWAV47, New York 2018. (slides are here)
- Workshop on "Bridging disciplines in analysing text as social and cultural data", 21-22 September 2017 at the Turing Institute in London.
Academic service
- Co-organizer Federated Web Search track at TREC (2013-2014).
- Program Committees: I regularly serve on the PCs of various conferences,
including EMNLP, ACL, EACL, NAACL, SIGIR, ICWSM, ECIR, CIKM etc.
Area chair: ACL 2019, EMNLP 2019, NAACL 2021, EMNLP 2021, EMNLP 2022, FAccT 2024
Senior Area chair: EMNLP 2020, EACL 2023
Data chair: ICWSM 2021
Miscellaneous
- Media coverage: New York Times, Time Magazine, New Scientist, Radio 538, Volkskrant, etc.
- Invited talks (selection): Carnegie Mellon University (2022), VarDial workshop (2022), Indiana University Bloomington (2021), Bocconi University (2021), Workshop on NLP+CSS at EMNLP 2020, Keynote at the Computational Humanities Research workshop (2020), Keynote at COMPTEXT 2020,
- A video on Youtube of a talk I gave in Feb 2017 summarizing some of my work.
- Featured in Women in NLP spotlights.
- Special issue on computational sociolinguistics.
- Awards/Fellowships: KNAW Early Career Award (2019), Veni grant (2019), Gerrit van Dijk Award (2018), Overijssel PhD Award (2017), Alan Turing Institute Fellowship (2016), UT in the media award (2013), Fulbright scholarship (2009) and the WO Echo Beta Techniek award (2007).
- Teaching: Methods in AI Research (AI Msc, intro to ML/NLP, 2019—); Social Computing (AI Msc, 2020); Human-centered machine learning (AI Msc, 2021— ; some slides on fairness are here (1), here (2) and here (3)). I'm also involved in lifelong learning/education for professionals (government professionals, 2019—)