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.

GithubCVNon-academic stuffkentkc [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.

Photo of Kent K. Chang

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, “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, Danica Chen, David Bamman (forthcoming 2023), “Dramatic Conversation Disentanglement.” ACL 2023 Findings.

  • Kent K. Chang, Mackenzie Cramer, Sandeep Soni, David Bamman (2023), “Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4.” arXiv:2212.10465
    Preprint

  • Kent K. Chang (forthcoming July 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, 2023.
    Preprint

  • Michelle Moravec and Kent K. Chang (April 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 (October 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 (July 2020), “Book Reviews and the Consolidation of Genre.” DH2020 conference. 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 May 2023

Amy Sherman-Palladino, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

frank And don't you ever fuck with a musical production of ours again!

george Next time, there's gonna be tech!

midge . . . parasitic illness. Yeah, I guess while he mourns his little cartwheeler, I'm supposed to tell you about all the ways that trash can kill you.

—V.iv. “Susan