Justine Zhang

I develop computational methods to study conversations. I am interested in study how conversationalists use language to do things with and to each other, and how they navigate often-challenging interactions. I’m particularly interested in settings where people have conversations on behalf of institutions, and in analyzing conversations as a window into how these institutions work in practice. Drawing on techniques from natural language processing, computational social science, and causal inference, I examine large datasets containing conversation transcripts. Past and present work has considered settings such as political discourse, mental health counseling, and law enforcement.