Faculty Directory
Larry Birnbaum

Professor of Computer Science

Contact

2233 Tech Drive
Mudd Room 3513
Evanston, IL 60208-3109

847-491-3640Email Larry Birnbaum

Website

Larry Birnbaum's Homepage

Intelligent Information Lab

Departments

Computer Science

Affiliations

Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence

Download CV

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT

M.S. Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT

B.S. Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT


Research Interests

Larry Birnbaum's research and teaching focus on applied AI and human-AI collaboration.  He and his students develop, study, and apply new technologies in natural language processing (NLP), intelligent information systems, social media data analytics, machine learning, computational journalism and media, and conversational interfaces. A key focus is on methods for the automatic generation of content by machine, including specifically the automatic generation of narratives from data, and on natural human-AI collaboration using conversational interaction. Larry's research also spans intelligent information systems, including models of automatic and contextual search and information diversity; preference predication and recommendation using social media data; and applications of AI to journalism and media.


Selected Publications

    Allen, N., Templon, J., McNally, P., Birnbaum, L., and Hammond, K.  Statsmonkey: Automatic generation of narrative from data.  Computational Models of Narrative: Papers from the 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium, Arlington, VA, 2010.


    Boon, M., and Birnbaum, L.  Identifying “horse race” stories in election news.  Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Los Angeles, CA, 2019.


    Bursztyn, V., and Birnbaum, L.  Thousands of small, constant rallies: A large-scale analysis of partisan WhatsApp groups.  Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 2019.


    Cohn, J., Kuntz, A, and Birnbaum, L.  AttitudeBuzz: Using social media data to localize complex attitudes.  Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Paris, France, 2015.


    Gomez-Zara, D., Boon, M., and Birnbaum, L.  Who is the hero, the villain, and the victim? Detection of roles in news articles using natural language techniques.  Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Tokyo, Japan, 2018.


    Noraset, T., Liang, C., Birnbaum, L., and Downey, D.  Definition modeling: Learning to define word embeddings in natural language.  Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Francisco, CA, 2017.


    O’Banion, S., and Birnbaum, L.  Using explicit linguistic expressions of preference in social media to predict voting behavior.  Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Niagara Falls, Canada, 2013.  (Best paper award.)


    Yang, Y., Downey, D., Birnbaum, L., and Wang, J.  Acquiring common sense properties from embeddings with limited human guidance.  ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia, July, 2018.