Can language models stand in for people in social measurement?
I build survey instruments that exploit where they can, and detection methods for where they fail. My work uses large language models to measure public opinion from social media and to probe the limits of synthetic respondents.
PhD candidate in Survey and Data Science, University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, advised by Frederick G. Conrad.
Research program
When persona-conditioned language models can predict an individual's survey responses, and the mechanisms behind the cases where they cannot.
Whether populations of language-model agents reproduce social processes, or only their surface outcomes. The population-scale version of the twins question.
Demographic inference, stance measurement, and platform ecology, toward a dissertation on the conditional representativeness of online expression.
AI interviewers and LLM-assisted coding of open responses: building and evaluating the tools, not just studying them.
Efficient ranking and embedding-space summarization for making sense of large social-media corpora.
Selected papers