Brendan T. O'Connor

Brendan T. O'Connor is an Associate Professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he directs the SLANG Lab and serves as Associate Director of the Computational Social Science Institute. His research bridges statistical machine learning and natural language processing with social science applications, particularly using text data from news and social media to understand societal patterns.

His work focuses on developing text analysis methods to answer social science questions in domains like political science and sociolinguistics. Current collaborative projects include combating misinformation, analyzing bias in news coverage, and developing tools for clinical discourse assessment using large language models.

O'Connor's publications demonstrate a consistent focus on computational social science, with recent work exploring multilingual analysis, legal discourse patterns, and sociolinguistic variation. His methodological contributions span coreference resolution, event extraction, and argument mining.

At UMass, he contributes to multiple research centers including the Computational Social Science Institute, UMass NLP group, and Centers for Data Science and Intelligent Information Retrieval. He teaches graduate seminars in natural language processing and maintains active collaborations across disciplines.