Ansel MacLaughlin is a PhD student in Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He is in the natural language processing program, advised by Professor David Smith. The Kansas City, Missouri native is a graduate of Rhodes College, where he received a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Greek and Roman Studies.
MacLaughlin’s research area includes natural language processing and information retrieval, and he is a member of the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks. He hopes to combine his interests of computer science, linguistics, and ancient languages, and apply them to his research.
I am finishing my third year of the PhD program.
I came to Northeastern thinking I would be working on digital humanities research, leveraging my bachelor’s degrees in CS and Classics, but I soon realized that I am more interested in computational journalism.
I am especially interested in the problem of source reconstruction – when writing a news article, journalists may rely on variety of other documents, such as press releases, interview transcripts and other news articles, both for general inspiration and as sources from which they may paraphrase or quote material. Inferring how journalists excerpt and modify these documents is difficult, however, since some documents are often never published and the relationships between documents are unknown. However, when multiple articles share many of the same sources, such as a group of news articles written about the same scientific article, we may be able to leverage similarities between clustered articles to infer their shared sources and thus examine how different news outlets cover the same source material in different ways.
Journalists act as the gatekeepers to all sorts of information, controlling what reaches the public eye and how it is presented. So, modeling the processes by which they select stories and create content seems quite important.
I am undecided as of right now whether I’d like to go into academia or industry.
Kansas City.
Ansel MacLaughlin is a PhD student in Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He is in the natural language processing program, advised by Professor David Smith. The Kansas City, Missouri native is a graduate of Rhodes College, where he received a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Greek and Roman Studies.
MacLaughlin’s research area includes natural language processing and information retrieval, and he is a member of the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks. He hopes to combine his interests of computer science, linguistics, and ancient languages, and apply them to his research.
I am finishing my third year of the PhD program.
I came to Northeastern thinking I would be working on digital humanities research, leveraging my bachelor’s degrees in CS and Classics, but I soon realized that I am more interested in computational journalism.
I am especially interested in the problem of source reconstruction – when writing a news article, journalists may rely on variety of other documents, such as press releases, interview transcripts and other news articles, both for general inspiration and as sources from which they may paraphrase or quote material. Inferring how journalists excerpt and modify these documents is difficult, however, since some documents are often never published and the relationships between documents are unknown. However, when multiple articles share many of the same sources, such as a group of news articles written about the same scientific article, we may be able to leverage similarities between clustered articles to infer their shared sources and thus examine how different news outlets cover the same source material in different ways.
Journalists act as the gatekeepers to all sorts of information, controlling what reaches the public eye and how it is presented. So, modeling the processes by which they select stories and create content seems quite important.
I am undecided as of right now whether I’d like to go into academia or industry.
Kansas City.
