Papers by Naitian Zhou
Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Cultural NLP has experienced rapid growth to meet the need to ensure language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a well-developed theory of culture to clarify methodological constraints and affordances and offer theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework clarifies methodological constraints and affordances and offers theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence. |
Social Meme-ing: Measuring Linguistic Variation in Memes (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we analyze memes as a form of language subject to the same kinds of sociolinguistic variation as other modalities, such as written language and speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational pipeline to cluster memes into templates and semantic variables, taking advantage of their multimodal structure to learn meme semantics from an unstructured dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method uses 3.8M images from a reddit meme database to analyze linguistic variation in memes. |
Spatial Layouts in News Homepages Capture Human Preferences (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Homepage layouts are daily and manually curated by expert human news editors, and serve as a proxy for information prioritization. |
| Approach: | They propose a pairwise preference model to capture ranked preferences between news items . they use a dataset of 3,000 news homepages captured twice daily over a five-year period . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model infers editorial preference with over 0.7 F1 score (based on human trials) it also ranks local city council policies passed over ten years in San Francisco, evaluating their "newsworthiness". |
POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Tool (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Jiaxin Pei, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Xingyao Wang, Naitian Zhou, Apostolos Dedeloudis, Jackson Sargent, David Jurgens
| Challenge: | POTATO is a free, fully open-sourced annotation system that supports labeling many types of text and multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use POTATO to design and deploy complex annotation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed annotation system improves labeling speed and productivity over two tasks. |
Condolence and Empathy in Online Communities (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using computational tools, we examine the dynamics of condolence online. |
| Approach: | They develop computational tools to analyze 11.4M distress expressions and 2.8M condolence offerings in a massive dataset of 11.4 million people. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reveals that condolence features differ from those seen in interpersonal settings and that the features of condolance individuals find most helpful differ from the features seen in social media. |