Ted Pedersen - Current Research Interests

I have a pretty long history of research in developing and evaluating a variety of methods in Natural Language Processing, most often involving problems of semantics or meaning. Examples have included word sense disambiguation and semantic similarity. That said, I am no longer actively pursuing this type of research.

In more recent years, since about 2020, I have become far more interested in the social impacts of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. This leads to research questions that explore the possible harms of different kinds of language technology, and the historical trends and ethical foundations (or lack thereof) that lead to the decisions to develop and use these kinds of technologies.

Work that I particularly admire that is related to these interests includes the following :

The Markup, Show Your Work, ongoing
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, The New Press 2010
Simone Brown, Dark Matters, Duke Univ Press 2015
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, NYU Press 2018
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology, Polity 2019
Meredith Broussard, More Than A Glitch, MIT Press 2023

Of course this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but is intended to provide starting points for research that resonates with me and that I find especially motivating and inspiring. Please review at least one of the above and if you share my enthusiasm and think you might like pursue such ideas in a UROP, Independent Study Project, or MS thesis under my direction, then please be in touch via email.

I am also interested in supervising UROP or MS students (Plan A or B) who would like to participate in a SemEval task. This is an annual friendly competition in Natural Language Processing which starts in September and lasts until April. You can find out more about SemEval here. You can also find papers we have done based on SemEval participation here - just search for SemEval in the title. If you are interested in participating in an upcoming task then please feel free to be in touch via email.

Finally, we do not have a PhD program, and I do not have any funding to offer to graduate students. That said, many of our MS students are supported as Teaching Assistants. Please see here for more information about how to apply to our MS program.

March 12, 2024

By: Ted Pedersen - tpederse AT d umn edu