معرفی
Rob Voigt
Assistant Professor of Linguistics and courtesy faculty in Computer Science at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Institute for Policy Research and Cognitive Science Program. Specializes in computational linguistics, focusing on natural language processing (NLP) applied to social science questions including policing, mental health, and immigration. Director of the Linguistic Mechanisms Lab, exploring how language reflects and shapes societal structures.
Education
- PhD in Linguistics (2019), Stanford University
- Postdoctoral Scholar (2019-2020), Stanford University
- M.A. in East Asian Studies (2013), Stanford University
- B.A. in Chinese (2008), Vassar College
Research Interests
Combines computational methods with sociolinguistics to study:
- Police-community interaction through body-worn camera data
- Linguistic markers of procedural justice and racial disparities
- Language in marginalized communities and social movements
- LLM applications to clinical language analysis (autism spectrum disorders)
- Historical discourse analysis of immigration policies
Recent Work
Recent projects include analyzing 140 years of political immigration rhetoric (PNAS 2022), evaluating officer communication training via bodycam NLP (PNAS Nexus 2024), and developing stereotype analysis pipelines (EMNLP 2024). Active in policy-relevant research through grants on police training (NIJ) and mental health language analysis (NIH).
Awards & Recognition
Holds Cozzarelli Prize (2017) for groundbreaking policing research and Cialdini Prize for field methods innovation. Recipient of interdisciplinary fellowships from Stanford and NIH grants totaling $8M+.
Teaching
Current courses include Text Processing for Linguists. Known for ungrading pedagogy emphasizing intrinsic motivation and collaborative learning. Develops open-access computational linguistics curricula using Unix/Python.
Labs & Collaborations
Linguistic Mechanisms Lab focuses on socially responsible NLP. Collaborates with criminologists, cognitive scientists, and sociologists on projects like the Media Accountability Project (racial disparities in gun violence reporting).
