Research
Overview
My research mainly lies in the computational social science, natural language processing, and culturally competent large language models domains. I primarily build and apply tools to study identity, culture, and expression. While pursuing my bachelor’s degree, I developed a variation of the public goods game and deployed it to collect participant data. More recently, I developed tools to apply Large Language Models, such as Meta’s Llama-2, to perform named-individual identification and stance detection on tweets. Currently, I am investigating ways to dynamically extract dimensions of cultures from a given corpus of social media data, and then place an individual within the cultures we have identified. A second part of this investigation is looking into how well LLMs can model these cultures, and respond as if it is a member of that culture.
Current Projects
My main focus is on culturally competent large language models, which is a research area designed to make sure that LLMs are aware, respectful, and adaptable to a number of different cultural contexts. Currently, my research in this area is still in it’s initial stages, but this is an important and growing research area which I believe will yield some very interesting and useful results.
A second project I am working on is expressions of cultural identity on social media, and how users from different regions express their cultural identity.
Publications
- A. Caceres-Wright, N. Udhayasankar, G. Bunn, S. Shuster, K. Joseph. “Explicit Stance Detection in the Political Domain: A New Concept and Associated Dataset”. Published at the 17th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS), September 18-20, 2024. Runner Up, Best Student Lead Paper Award
Posters
- A. Caceres-Wright, G. Bunn, S. Shuster, K. Joseph. “Who supports Bernie? Analyzing identity and ideological variation of Bernie supporters on Twitter”. Poster presented at the 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), July 17-20, 2024.
Academic Service
- Reviewer, 2025 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS)
- Reviewer, 2025 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)
- Reviewer, 2024 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS)
Previous Research Projects
While completing my bachelors degree, I had the opportunity to volunteer as a research assistant in the Center for Applied Moral Psychology under the supervision of Dr. Azim Shariff and Dr. Joe Green. In this project, I developed a variation of the public good game using the oTree framework and python. Once built I deployed it to collect data from participants and wrote a report on my findings, which can be read here.