Julia Mendelsohn

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Information. Previously, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. I completed my PhD in Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, and hold a BA in Linguistics and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

My research lies at the intersection of language, politics, and computation. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I draw from diverse fields including natural language processing (NLP), political communication, sociolinguistics, and psychology. I am particularly interested in computationally modeling subtle rhetoric in online political discussions, and understanding the social, political and technological implications of such language.

Here are some directions that I have worked on and continue to be excited about:

1. Framing of complex sociopolitical issues in news and social media, and the broader implications of these linguistic choices. I have studied framing in the context of immigration and social movements on Twitter and Russian media posts about the Russia-Ukraine war.
2. Implicitly (and sometimes covertly) harmful language in discussions about marginalized communities. I have published work about developing computational approaches to study dehumanization and dogwhistle communication. Starting with my work on dogwhistles, I have recently become especially interested in building language technologies to study and combat antisemitism.
3. Computational sociolinguistics. I have done some work on language variation, change, and social meaning in online communities (and would love to do more!). I am interested in bridging sociolinguistics and computational social science to understand the relationship between linguistic practices and social networks.

You can find more information about me from my curriculum vitae.