Dallas Card

Dallas Card is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Prior to his current position, he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Stanford NLP Group and the Stanford Data Science Institute. His academic journey began with a Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was advised by Noah Smith.

Dallas Card's research centers on making machine learning more reliable and responsible, and on using machine learning and natural language processing to learn about society, history, and culture. His work spans multiple domains including computational social science, digital humanities, and AI ethics. He investigates how language models can be made more trustworthy while also applying these models to understand societal phenomena, historical texts, and cultural dynamics.

His publication record demonstrates significant contributions across several key areas. Card's research shows a clear trajectory from core NLP methodology development toward increasingly societal applications. His recent work focuses on semantic change detection across the lifespan, media ecosystem analysis through podcasts, linguistic coordination methodologies, and historical language analysis using corpora like the Corpus of Founding Era American English. His research consistently bridges technical NLP advances with societal impact, particularly examining bias, reliability, and the cultural implications of language technologies.

Among his notable achievements, Card received a Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) in 2022 for "The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research." His work has also garnered media attention from major outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR for research on political framing of immigration.

Card currently advises several Ph.D. students including Ben Litterer (co-advised with David Jurgens), Lavinia Dunagan, and Meera Desai (co-advised with Abigail Jacobs). His research is supported by collaborations across institutions including Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. He actively contributes to the academic community through service on conference committees including as a member of the FAccT steering committee (2023-2025) and as ACL 2025 publicity chair.