David Smith

Associate Professor

David Smith

Research interests

  • Efficient inference for machine learning models with complex latent structure
  • Modeling natural language structures, such as morphology, syntax, and semantics
  • Modeling the mutations in texts as they propagate through social networks and in language across space and time
  • Interactive information retrieval and machine learning for expert users

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University
  • BA in Classics, Harvard University

Biography

David A. Smith is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. He is a founding member of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University’s center for the digital humanities and computational social sciences.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Smith was a professor at the University of Massachusetts and a contributor to Tufts University's Perseus Digital Library, one of the most widely used linguistic and cultural research systems in the humanities field. Funded by the NSF, NEH, DARPA, ONR, AFRL, the Mellon Foundation, and Google, Smith has published widely in natural language processing and computational linguistics, information retrieval, digital libraries, digital humanities, and political science. 

Projects

Recent publications

  • Detecting and Evaluating Local Text Reuse in Social Networks

    Citation: Shaobin Xu, David Smith, Abigail Mullen, and Ryan Cordell. Detecting and evaluating local text reuse in social networks. In ACL Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media, 2014.
  • Content-based Models of Quotation

    Citation: Ansel MacLaughlin, David A. Smith. (2021). Content-based Models of Quotation EACL, 2296-2314. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.195

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Current PhD Students

Previous PhD Students

  • Ansel MacLaughlin

  • Xinyu Hua

  • Rui Dong

  • Liwen Hou

  • Shaobin Xu