[NLP for Social Science #1]: Professor Allison Parrish - Incite at Columbia University

This free public lecture series explores how NLP is used to illuminate social processes and institutions.

#1 "Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn't survive transcription"

We are thrilled to welcome Prof. Allison Parrish, who will present a talk entitled "Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn't survive transcription"

In this talk, poet and programmer Allison Parrish discusses her experiences using small language models to generate poetry and other forms of experimental text. Parrish guides us on through-line her recent research, from the curation of a corpus of public domain poetry, to bespoke phoneme-to-grapheme-to-phoneme models, to the invention of new poetic forms with variational autoencoders. Parrish concludes that, when it comes to writing poetry, the fidelity of a model's output is not nearly as important as the affordances and material aspects of the model itself.

Allison Parrish is a professor, computer programmer, poet, artist, and game designer working at the intersection of computation and language. In addition to serving as an assistant professor at NYU, she was named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by The Village Voice in 2016, and her zine of computer-generated poems called "Compasses" received an honorary mention in the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica.

Allison is the co-creator of the board game Rewordable (Clarkson Potter, 2017) and the author of several books, including @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015) and Articulations (Counterpath, 2018). Her poetry has recently appeared in BOMB Magazine and Strange Horizons. You can find out more on her website.

This event will be hosted in person at Columbia's campus as well as online. Register for a Zoom link and location details.

About this workshop

The goal of this new lecture series is to invite scholars whose research uses contemporary NLP methods to illuminate not only the internal structures and patterns of linguistic forms but also the social processes and institutions in which they are embedded. The work of these speakers represents some of the most promising directions in applied NLP due to its technical rigor, research design, and theoretical depth.

Support for this series is generously provided by INCITE at Columbia and the Platial Analysis Lab at McGill. This workshop is jointly organized by Jack LaViolette (Columbia University, sociology) and Mikael Brunila (McGill University, geography).

You can find the complete schedule of dates and speakers on our website.