CATS Lab

CATS (Computational Analysis of Text and Society) is an interdisciplinary research lab led by Julia Mendelsohn at the University of Maryland College of Information and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. We are also part of the broader Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab.

We develop computational methods to study language, politics, and society. Some areas we’re especially interested in include persuasion, framing, and the (often implicit) linguistic strategies that shape how people understand the world around them. We’re also interested in computational sociolinguistics: how people use language both to construct and reflect social identity.

We treat language technologies, including large language models, primarily as tools for understanding people: they help us find patterns and measure social scientific constructs at scale. But we’ve also been thinking a lot about the emergence of AI as a political issue, which motivates work ranging from analyzing AI-related discourse in online media to evaluating social biases in LLMs and their downstream implications.