Publications

*denotes equal contribution


Dark & Stormy: Modeling Humor in Sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Venkata Govindarajan and Laura Biester
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026
[doi]

Eeyore: Realistic Depression Simulation via Supervised and Preference Optimization
Siyang Liu, Bianca Brie, Wenda Li, Laura Biester, Andrew Lee, James Pennebaker, and Rada Mihalcea
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL, 2025
[doi]

Sports and Women's Sports: Gender Bias in Text Generation with Olympic Data
Laura Biester
Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2025
[poster] [doi]

Representing and Clustering Errors in Offensive Language Detection
Jood Otey, Laura Biester, and Steven Wilson
Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Student Research Workshop, 2025
[doi]

How developments in natural language processing help us in understanding human behaviour
Rada Mihalcea, Laura Biester, Ryan Boyd, Zhijing Jin, Veronica Perez-Rosas, Steven Wilson, and James Pennebaker
Nature Human Behaviour, 2024
[doi]

Tightly Coupled Worksheets and Homework Assignments for NLP
Laura Biester and Winston Wu
Sixth Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing at ACL, 2024
[resources] [poster]

Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models
Oana Ignat*, Zhijing Jin*, Artem Abzaliev, Laura Biester, Santiago Castro, Naihao Deng, Xinyi Gao, Aylin Gunal, Jacky He, Ashkan Kazemi, Muhammad Khalifa, Namho Koh, Andrew Lee, Siyang Liu, Do Min, Shinka Mori, Joan Nwatu, Veronica Perez-Rosas, Siqi Shen, Zekun Wang, Winston Wu, and Rada Mihalcea
Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), 2024

Temporal Arcs of Mental Health: Patterns Behind Changes in Depression over Time
Laura Biester, James Pennebaker, and Rada Mihalcea
Affective Computing + Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Late Breaking Results (LBR), 2023
[poster] [doi]

We Are in This Together: Quantifying Community Subjective Wellbeing and Resilience
MeiXing Dong, Ruixuan Sun*, Laura Biester*, and Rada Mihalcea
International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2023
[doi]

Lexical Measurement of Teaching Qualities
Laura Biester, Ian Stewart, Laura Hirshfield, Rada Mihalcea, and Sara Pozzi
American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM) Division, 2023
[data] [slides]

Improving Mental Health Classifier Generalization with Pre-Diagnosis Data
Yujian Liu*, Laura Biester*, and Rada Mihalcea
International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2023
[slides] [poster] [doi]

Emotional and Cognitive Changes Surrounding Online Depression Identity Claims
Laura Biester, James Pennebaker, and Rada Mihalcea
PLOS ONE, 2022
[doi]

Analyzing the Effects of Annotator Gender Across NLP Tasks
Laura Biester, Vanita Sharma, Ashkan Kazemi, Naihao Deng, Steven Wilson, and Rada Mihalcea
1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP at LREC, 2022
[code] [poster]

Understanding the Impact of COVID-19 on Online Mental Health Forums
Laura Biester, Katie Matton, Janarthanan Rajendran, Emily Mower Provost, and Rada Mihalcea
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems: Special Issue on Using AI and Data Science to Handle Pandemics and Related Disruptions, 2021
[code] [poster] [doi]

IBM @ TREC Clinical Trials Track 2021
Laura Biester, Venkata Joopudi, and Bharath Dandala
Proceedings of the Thirtieth Text REtrieval Conference, 2021
[slides] [poster]

Building Location Embeddings from Physical Trajectories and Textual Representations
Laura Biester, Carmen Banea, and Rada Mihalcea
1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2020
[code] [video] [slides]

Quantifying the Effects of COVID-19 on Mental Health Support Forums
Laura Biester*, Katie Matton*, Janarthanan Rajendran, Emily Mower Provost, and Rada Mihalcea
1st Workshop on {NLP} for {COVID}-19 (Part 2) at {EMNLP}, 2020
[code] [video] [slides] [doi]