Affiliated Faculty in Computation and Language
Natural language processing is part of a broader multidisciplinary study of computation and language:
- Computational methods to effectively generate, analyze, and ideally understand natural language (natural language processing).
- Computational modeling of how humans process and use language (computational linguistics; e.g., in linguistics, psychology, etc.).
- Computational study of language in society and culture, and NLP for automated content analysis (cultural analytics; e.g. in political science, literature, media studies, etc.).
- Using NLP to make practical tools for users (e.g. in information retrieval, human-computer interaction, educational technology, multimodal systems, etc.).
Below are some of the many faculty at UMass Amherst who teach, research, and collaborate across these related areas. This includes faculty with appointments in CICS, Linguistics, and several other departments across the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Information and Computer Sciences (CICS)
Amir Houmansadr
Privacy and security in ML / NLP
Andrew Lan
Educational content generation, learner assessment from text
Andrew McCallum
Machine learning, information extraction, knowledge bases
Brendan O'Connor
NLP for computational social science, social factors in NLP
Chuang Gan
Computer vision, multimodal foundation models
Ethan Zuckerman
Public Policy, Comm., and Information
Media attention, digital governance
Hamed Zamani
Information retrieval and recommendation
Hong Yu
Adjunct affiliate, CICS
Biomedical NLP
James Allan
Information retrieval and controversy detection
Juan Zhai
Software engineering and NLP
Katrin Erk
CICS & Linguistics
Computational semantics
Laure Thompson
Adjunct affiliate, CICS
Cultural analytics, interpretability
Madalina (Ina) Fiterau
Clinical NLP, multimodal learning
Mohit Iyyer
Adjunct affiliate, CICS (as of 2025)
Text generation, QA
Narges Mahyar
Human-computer interaction and civic technology
Przemyslaw Grabowicz
Adjunct affiliate, CICS
Comp. social science, fair and explainable ML
Razieh Negin Rahimi
Information retrieval and explainable search
Subhransu Maji
Visual recognition, interpretable AI
W. Bruce Croft
Emeritus
Information retrieval
Linguistics
See also the Computational Linguistics research area page on the Linguistics website.
Brian Dillon
Computational psycholinguistics
Gaja Jarosz
Computational phonology, learnability, and acquisition
Joe Pater
Phonology and computational models of human learning
Katrin Erk
CICS & Linguistics
Computational semantics
Kristine Yu
Computational prosody, phonetics, phonology
Michael Becker
Computational phonology, minoritized languages
Rajesh Bhatt
Syntactic theory, Hindi/Urdu treebanks
Shota Momma
Psycholinguistics, syntax
Social Sciences and Humanities
Douglas Rice
Political Science and Legal Studies
Computational legal studies
Ethan Zuckerman
Public Policy, Comm., and Information
Media attention, digital governance
Justin Gross
Political Science and DACSS
NLP and content analysis of political ideologies and media
Kelsey Shoub
Public Policy
Identity, policing, discourse and policy change
Mohammad Atari
Psychology
Computational psychology, ethics in AI, NLP for psychology
Moira Inghilleri
Comparative Literature
Translation, translation ethics, philosophy of language
Stephen Harris
English
Historical linguistics and non-literal language
Weiai Wayne Xu
Communication
Digital platforms, text models, polarization, disinformation