JANA THOMPSON
Writings
I'm including various things I've written over the years here from academic papers to short stories. I often write to just pass the time when I'm in transit somewhere on a train or a bus. For my few examples of marketing materials, please contact me.
Academic writings
Recent Work
Anthropocene Spectres of the Salish Sea
Proceedings paper on contested representations on landscape in the Salish Sea bioregion
Meaningless Gods and Posthuman Companions: Situated Meaning in the Future of AI
Paper questioning the validity of artificial general intelligence as a concept and critiquing AGI through a post-humanist post-colonialist lens
QuALITY: Question Answering with Long Input Texts, Yes!
Co-authored paper on QuALITY, a multiple-choice QA dataset with context passages in English that have an average length of about 5,000 tokens, much longer than typical current models (at time of publication) can process
BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering
Co-authored paper on the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ), a dataset of question-sets constructed by the authors that highlight attested social biases against people belonging to protected classes along nine social dimensions relevant for U.S. English-speaking contexts
Get to Know Me: Creating Inclusive and Culturally-Competent Conversational Agents
Abstract for upcoming talk at a workshop on structured knowledge and conversational agents at AKBC 2021 based on research with Ali Hosseini and Isabella Su
Mental Models and Interpretability in AI Fairness Tools and Code Environments
Peer-reviewed proceedings paper given at AI-HCI 2021 on the role of user understanding in AI Fairness tools and frameworks
Meaningless Gods and Posthuman Companions: Situated Meaning in the Future of AI
Talk (see abstract here) given at Colloque International IA Fictions in June 2021 on meaning, large-scale AI systems, and the deeply personal in the development of AI research.
Personal Memory in the Platform: Implications of Children's Use of Google Drive
Abstract submitted to Data & Society's Platform Governance meeting discussing potential implications of the storing of children's artwork and homework in a third-party platform in their later personal and professional lives.
The Cultural AI Design Tool: Reimagining the Spectrum of the Artificial Intelligence Design Process
Co-authored with Christine Meinders, designer of the Cultural AI Design Tool (now renamed Poieto). Submitted to AI & Society for publication. We examine the assumptions that underly AI design and development, especially within academic research, and propose alternative and additional processes that take cultural and sociotechnical considerations as part of the design process.
Older Work
A Process-based Approach to The Treatment of English-language Past Participles in Texas German
My master's thesis from the Germanic Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin (reviewed by Professor Hans C. Boas and Professor Katherine Arens) After investigating the corpus available at the time (2004-05) in the Texas German Dialect Project, I investigated how English-language past participles embedded in the German of heritage speakers in the Texas Hill Country abided by German or English rules of phonology and morphology, or a mixture thereof, and what this behavior showed for the status of German as a living language in the Hill Country.
Lyrics That Kill: An Analysis of Lexical Choice and Metaphor in Hip-Hop Lyrics
Paper that I presented at a symposium at Rice University in Fall 2004. Probably my favorite thing I've ever written - it's an analysis of verbs of violence using Frame Semantics and metaphor to illustrate the transfer of discourse practices from AAVE to music.
Was hat gechanged: Language Convergence in Texas German
Paper published in Proceedings From the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society Volume 41, Number 2, 1 January 2005, 95-106(12). A summarized sub-portion of my master's thesis that I gave as a presentation at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
Decks
Embodied Ethnography: Posthuman and Community Approaches
A talk on ethnography given at Vienna Anthropology Days 2020.
A brief talk I gave on social trends and responses in April 2020 for a friend's series of online trend talks about COVID-19.
Natural Language Processing The Hard Way
An introduction for natural language processing for Data Day Texas 2017.
Natural Language Processing For Designers
A talk I gave during a lunch hour at Fjord for why natural language processing was useful for designers beyond simply word clouds.
Mobility in the United States
Quantitative research done at Fjord to show that all millennials weren't moving to cities and that actual living patterns were different than what people though they were. This was a counterpoint in a study where the qualitative research focused only on urban millennials.