Kent K. Chang

Photo of Kent K. Chang

Kent K. Chang is a PhD student in the School of Information and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is advised by Prof. David Bamman, researching in natural language processing and cultural analytics.

GithubCVLinkedInkentkc [at] berkeley.edu

Before coming to Berkeley, Kent was a predoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University (Department of Social and Decision Sciences); he holds a BA (English language and literature) from National Taiwan University and an MS (Digital Humanities) from University College London, and is the recipient of Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study.

Kent’s research uses natural language processing to understand and facilitate the process of meaning-making and social interaction in cultural texts, with particular interests in dialogue and narrative understanding. He looks to improve the performance of NLP methods on domains relevant to inquiry in the humanities and social sciences and to innovate new tasks within NLP that directly speak to the needs of these communities. With an interdisciplinary background, he seeks to leverage NLP as a method for literary, historical, and sociological inquiries, putting into synergy the nuance of critical theory and the affordance of neural-based representation learning.

Teaching

  • Graduate Student Instructor, “Applied Natural Language Processing” (info 256), UC Berkeley, Fall 2023.

  • Graduate Student Instructor, “Natural Language Processing” (info 159/259), UC Berkeley, Spring 2023.

  • Graduate Student Instructor, “Information Organization and Retrieval” (info 202), UC Berkeley, Fall 2022.

Publications

  • Kent K. Chang, Mackenzie Cramer, Sandeep Soni, David Bamman (forthcoming 2023), “Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4.” EMNLP 2023.
    Preprint

  • Kent K. Chang, Danica Chen, David Bamman (2023), “Dramatic Conversation Disentanglement.” ACL 2023 Findings.
    ACL Anthology

  • Kent K. Chang (2023), “The Queer Gap in Cultural Analytics.” Book chapter (peer-reviewed) in Debates in Digital Humanities 2023, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. University of Minnesota Press.
    Preprint

  • Michelle Moravec and Kent K. Chang (2021), “Feminist Bestsellers: A Digital History of 1970s Feminism.” Post45 × Journal of Cultural Analytics (special issue ed. Richard Jean So).

  • Kent K. Chang and Simon DeDeo (2020), “Divergence and the Complexity of Difference in Text and Culture.” Journal of Cultural Analytics.
    PDFGithub repo

  • Kent Chang, Yuerong Hu, Wenyi Shang, Aniruddha Sharma, Shubhangi Singhal, Ted Underwood, Jessica Witte, Peizhen Wu (2020), “Book Reviews and the Consolidation of Genre.” DH 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/02q2-1v27.

Most projects in progress are not listed here. To learn more, get in touch: kentkc [at] berkeley.edu; @KentKChang.

Current Obsession October 2023—present

David Shore, House, M. D.

algernon If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s tonight, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.

jack I haven’t asked you to dine with me anywhere tonight.

algernonI know. You are absurdly careless about sending out invitations. It is very foolish of you. Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

—Wilde, Earnest (1895)

frasier I’m famished. Why don’t we just head over to Campagne for dinner? My treat.

niles You’re on! Unless, you think it’s too odd to have dinner together, heh.

frasier I don’t think we’re in any danger of that—if our relationship became truly odd I think we’re both intelligent enough to recognize the signs.

—Frasier, VI.xvii. “The Dinner Party” (1999)

house Invite me to dinner Thursday night! Come on, we haven’t had a nice meal together since, oh—

wilson . . . yesterday, when I loaned you five thousand dollars to buy a new car.

house My treat!

—House, M. D., II.v. “Daddy’s Boy” (2005)