Hello!

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. I received my PhD in Computer Science & Engineering (more specifically, in natural language processing) from the University of Washington, advised by Noah Smith. Before that, I was an undergrad at Carleton College studying math and computer science.

My research mainly focuses on topics related to interpretability and explainability of natural language processing models, although I’m also interested in model evaluation and NLP for social science. I’m also very interested in computer science education and AI literacy more broadly!

Research

• “Stubborn Lexical Bias in Data and Models.” Sofia Serrano, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith. ACL Findings 2023. [screen-reader-friendly pdf] [publish-format pdf] [summary video]
• “Troubles in Text: Using Natural Language Processing to recognize government rationalizations for human rights abuses.” Sarah K. Dreier, Sofia Serrano, Emily K. Gade, Noah A. Smith. Working paper; presented at Politics and Computational Social Science (2020) and at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2021).
• “All That’s ‘Human’ Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text.” Elizabeth Clark, Tal August, Sofia Serrano, Nikita Haduong, Suchin Gururangan, Noah A. Smith. ACL 2021. Chosen as an outstanding paper. [screen-reader-friendly pdf] [publish-format pdf] [recorded talk by Elizabeth]
• “Is Attention Interpretable?” Sofia Serrano and Noah A. Smith. ACL 2019. [screen-reader-friendly pdf] [publish-format pdf] [recorded talk]
• “The partisan dimensions of religious rhetoric: Merging qualitative and natural language processing approaches to measure Congressional behavior.” Sarah K. Dreier, Lucy H. Lin, Sofia Serrano, Emily K. Gade, Noah A. Smith. Working paper; presented at Text as Data (2018) & Politics and Computational Social Science (2019).

Teaching

• Spring 2023 — Gave two invited talks for the UW Tacoma Computer Literacy seminar series, the first on neural network fundamentals [video] and the second on large language models [video]
• Spring 2023 — Gave a talk on large language models for UW CSE’s Security Seminar (590Y) [slide deck]
• Winter 2023 — I was the instructor of record for CSE 447: Natural Language Processing
• Autumn 2022 — Gave two guest lectures covering text classification for CSE 447: Natural Language Processing
• Winter 2022 — Gave a guest lecture on interpretability for NLP for CSE 447/517: Natural Language Processing
• Autumn 2021 — Gave a guest lecture on transformers and BERT for POLS 585: Texts as Data (Emory University)
• Winter 2021 — Teaching Assistant for CSE 447/517: Natural Language Processing
• Winter 2020 — Teaching Assistant for CSE 517: Natural Language Processing

Misc

• Fall 2023 — Together with Zander Brumbaugh and Noah A. Smith, I wrote a guide on language models called “Language Models: A Guide for the Perplexed” [screen-reader-friendly pdf] [arXiv-format pdf]
• Spring 2023 — I moderated a panel focused on demystifying ChatGPT for academics [video]