Assistant Professor
Department of Information Science, Drexel University
Pronouns: she/her
Office: #1120, 3675 Market St
Email: shadi.rezapour [at] drexel [dot] edu
Twitter: @shadi_rezapour
Office hours: by appointment
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I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Drexel's College of Computing and Informatics. In my research, I focus on the intersection of Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in order to gain a deeper understanding of human behavior, attitudes, and cultures through the analysis of text. By integrating computational models with social science theories, my goal is to develop NLP models that are both technically advanced and "socially-aware", taking into account the rich cultural and social context in which language is used. This allows for a more comprehensive capture of attributes such as social identities, stances, morals, and power dynamics from language, ultimately improving our understanding of real-world communication.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this field is the opportunity to study communication in online communities and social media platforms, where language is increasingly used to shape public opinion. I am particularly interested in using various models to study communication in these contexts, where language conveys complex social and cultural information. My current research topics include:
Discourse analysis of substance use disorder on social media
Analysis of polarized viewpoints on social media
Investigating the long-term impact of information products on people and societies
Analysis of moral perceptions and viewpoints through user-generated texts and images
Text summarization (e.g., scientific articles)
Structural balance and stability in social networks
Linguistic properties of online social movements
I received my Ph.D. in Information Sciences (2021) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where I was advised by Dr. Jana Diesner.
If you are interested in working with me, please fill out this form.
Most Recent News:
November 2023: Talk at the AI and Global Data Governance Panel at Drexel's Global Studies and Modern Languages.
November 2023: Layla is presenting our work on analyzing drug experiences online at TADA 2023.
November 2023: Attending CRA-WP Early Career in Chicago in November.
Sep 2023: 🎉 We started the DONUTS 🍩 Colab with Afsaneh Razi and John Seberger :)
Sep 2023: New paper on Reddit Network and Drugs
Sep 2023: New paper on LLMs and User's Perceptions:
July 2023: Our paper "Exploring Moral Principles Exhibited in OSS: A Case Study on GitHub Heated Issues" is accepted to ACM FSE 2023.
July 2023: Our paper "Moving Beyond Stance Detection in Cross-cutting Communication Analysis" is accepted to SBP 2023.
May 2023: Our paper "The Evolution of Substance Use Coverage in the Philadelphia Inquirer" is accepted to ICWSM Data Challenge 2023.
April 2023: Our abstract "Global disparities in research contributing to SDGs: attention, funding, and leadership" is selected for presentation at the 2nd annual International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI).
April 2023: Our abstract "Real Talk: A Case Study on HBO's Euphoria Viewer Discourse on Substance Use" is accepted to IC2S2.
Jan 2023: Our paper "Enhancing structural balance theory and measurement to analyze signed digraphs of real-world organizational networks." is accepted to Frontiers in Human Dynamics
Aug 2022: Our paper "An expert-in-the-loop method for domain-specific document categorization based on small annotated data" is accepted to JASIS&T.
July 2022: Talk at Simons AI and Humanity Research Cluster at UC Berkeley
April 2022: ECIR 2022 Tutorial on" Information Extraction from Social Media" with Shubhanshu Mishra and Jana Diesner. https://socialmediaie.github.io/tutorials/ECIR2022/
March 2022: Our paper "What Makes a Good Podcast Summary?" is accepted to SIGIR 2022.
March 2022: I will attend Philadelphia WiDS as a Panelist
Previous Announcements
July 2021: I defended my Ph.D. I will join the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University this Fall as an Assistant Professor
July 2021: Our paper "Incorporating the Measurement of Moral Foundations Theory into Analyzing Stances on Controversial Topics" is accepted to HyperText 2021
June 2021: I will attend the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, Chicago.
May 2021: Our tutorials "PyNetworkshop: Analyzing the Structure of Networks in Python - The Essentials, Signed Networks, and Network Optimization" is accepted to the Networks 2021 and IC2S2 conferences
January 2021: Our work "Detecting Non-Topical Content in Podcasts" is accepted to EACL 2021
December 2020: Our tutorials "PyNetworkshop: Analyzing the Structure of Networks in Python - The Essentials, Signed Networks, and Network Optimization" and "Information extraction from social media: A hands-on tutorial on tasks, data, & open source tools" are accepted to the WebConf 2021
October 2020: I presented my research at the Second Consortium For Data Scientists in Training at the Michigan Institute for Data Science
October 2020: Our work "A domain-knowledge-based approach for extracting socio-environmental outcomes from project reports" is accepted to METRICS workshop at ASIS&T
October 2020: Our work "Which group do you belong to? Sentiment-based PageRank to measure formal and informal influence of nodes in networks" is accepted to Complex Networks
October 2020: Our work "100,000 Podcasts: A Large-Scale spoken English document corpus" is accepted to COLING
October 2020: Our paper "An empirical methodology for detecting and prioritizing needs during crisis events" is accepted to EMNLP findings
September 2020: Honored to receive the NCWIT/Bloomberg grant to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration.
August 2020: Our paper "Multilevel structural evaluation of signed directed social networks based on balance theory" is accepted by Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71838-6
August 2020: I will attend the ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium in October 2020.
July 2020: I will attend the CSCW Doctoral Consortium in October 2020.
June 2020: I am going to work at Spotify Research this summer as a research scientist intern, I'll work with the Language Technologies Lab.
May 2020: We have four extended abstracts accepted to IC2S2
February 2020: Our paper "Beyond Citation: Corpus-based Methods for Assessing the Impact of Research Outcomes on Society" has been accepted to @lrec2020
December 2019: Organizing the 2nd Workshop on Computational Impact Detection from Text Data @ LREC 2020; due: February 20th, 2020
December 2019: Organizing the first student poster session at WIDS UIUC , March 6 2020, NCSA
November 2019: I will be attending CSCW to present our work on morality and social movements
October 2019: I will attend GHC to present a poster at ACM SRC
August 2019: Our extended abstract on social movements and morality is accepted in CSCW 2019
June 2019: Going to NAACL 2019 to present our paper on morality and social effects
May 2019: My poster is accepted at GHC 2019 for the ACM Student Research Competition
April 2019: I am going to present our paper "Enhancing the measurement of social effects by capturing morality" at the Midwest Speech and Language Days
March 2019: Our work "Enhancing the measurement of social effects by capturing morality" is accepted in WASSA workshop co-located with NAACL 2019
March 2019: Our abstract has been accepted for the 2019 Sunbelt Conference in Montréal