Hello! We're the NLP and Society lab, part of the Natural Language Processing group at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University (NL). We're interested in:

• Analyzing and modeling the relation between language and society using computational methods (computational sociolinguistics).
• The development of NLP methods to study social phenomena (NLP and computational social science). We focus on the analysis of online conversations and measurement in the social sciences.
• Techniques for more robust and explainable NLP.

People

Selected recent research

Measuring the instability of fine-tuning (ACL 2023), using the construct validity framework to evaluate the quality of text embeddings (EPJ Data Science 2022), learning style representations (Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, 2022), algorithmic fairness (AIES 2023).

Work in progress: identity emergence on social media, benchmarking LLMs using measurement theory.

PhD theses

• Melody Sepahpour-Fard "Performing, Transforming, and Amplifying Identity Online: Computational Insights into the Dynamic Interplay between Language, Audience, and Events" (2025)
• Anna Wegmann "Say the Same but Differently: Computational Approaches to Stylistic Variation and Paraphrasing" (2025)
• Qixiang Fang "Leveraging Measurement Theory for Natural Language Processing Research" (2024)

Visitors

Sanne Hoeken (2025), Gianluca Sperduti (2023)

Past members

Yupei Du (PhD; now postdoc at Saarland University); Melody Sepahpour-Fard (PhD at the University of Limerick); Shane Kaszefski Yaschuk (PhD student)

Software

See our GitHub repository!

Funded projects

ERC Stg DataDivers: Diving into Data Diversity for Fair and Robust NLP" (2025-2029), NWO Veni (2020-2024), NWO digital society 'Digitale samenleving - de geïnformeerde burger' (2020-2024),