Rezvaneh (Shadi) Rezapour
Assistant Professor
Department of Information Science
Drexel University
Pronouns: she/her
Office: #1191, 3675 Market St.
Email: shadi.rezapour [at] drexel [dot] edu
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Note: I am not currently accepting new PhD students, except for self-funded applicants. If you are interested in collaborating, please complete this form.
About Me
My name is Shadi Rezapour (officially Rezvaneh Rezapour). I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Drexel's College of Computing and Informatics. I received my Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where I was advised by Dr. Jana Diesner. (see full CV)
I am the PI of SocialNLP Lab and co-director of DONUTS Lab at Drexel University.
Research Interests
My research lies at the intersection of Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing (NLP). I develop technically advanced and socially-aware NLP models by integrating computational methods with social science theories. This approach captures the rich cultural and social contexts in which language is used, enhancing our understanding of human behavior, attitudes, and cultures.
My key area of interest is the study of online communities and social media platforms, where language shapes public opinion and conveys complex social and cultural information. My current research topics include:
Analysis of Online Narratives on Substance Use Disorder [SSMJ25][JMIR25][EMNLP24][ACL24] [ICWSM24][ASONAM23][ICWSM23]
Problem-Solving Therapy [ACL2025][Innovative Aging2025]
Human-Centered Evaluation of LLMs in Social Contexts [EMNLP25][AI&Society25][WebSci25]
Podcast Analysis (Summarization, Narrativity, etc.) [EACL24][SIGIR22][TREC21][EACL21][COLING20]
Analysis of Controversial Topics and Polarized Viewpoints [Websci25][SBP23][Hypertext21][EMNLP20][NAACL19][CSCW19]
Impact of Information Products on People and their Socio-cultural Environment [LREC24][JASIST23][LREC20][CSCW17]
Structural Balance and Stability in Social Networks [SNAM24][Networks Frontiers23][Scientific Reports20][Complex Networks21]
Keywords: NLP for social good, narrative and discourse analysis, social media analysis, opinion mining
Selected Service
ACM Websci 2026 proceeding chair
ICWSM 2025 tutorial co-chair
IC2S2 2024 local co-chair
ACM FAccT proceeding co-chair
CSCW area chair
Recent News
Our paper "Phenotypes of stigma expressed by people who use drugs on Reddit" has been accepted to the Social Science and Medicine Journal.
Our paper has been accepted for publication in AI and Society.
Received funding from the National Institute of Aging and PennAI to study problem-solving therapy.
Our paper "Tales of Morality: Comparing Human and LLM Moral Storytelling from Visual Cues" is accepted to EMNLP 2025.
Our paper "Not a Swiss Army Knife: Academics’ Perceptions of Trade-Offs Around Generative Artificial Intelligence Use" is accepted to ASIS&T 2025.
Received Longsview Fellowships with Jill Wenderott (PI) to explore "AI for Lab Notebooks: Supplanting Manual Entry with a Virtual Lab Assistant."
Our paper, "From Conversation to Automation: Leveraging Large Language Models to Analyze Strategies in Problem-Solving Therapy," has been accepted to ACL 2025.
Four papers accepted to ACM WebSci 2025.
Our paper "Shifting Narratives in Media Coverage: A Decade of Drug Discourse in The Philadelphia Inquirer" is accepted to JMIR Infodemiology.
Our paper "Words Matter: Reducing Stigma in Online Conversations about Substance Use with Large Language Models" has been accepted to EMNLP 2024.
Our paper "Two-Stage Graph-Augmented Summarization for Scientific Documents" has been accepted to the EMNLP Workshop of NLP4Science 2024.
September 2024: You can read the report of our ICWSM 2024 workshop here: https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/abstract.php?id=2024_80
August 2024: Our paper "Structural balance in real-world social networks: incorporating direction and transitivity in measuring partial balance" is accepted to the Social Network Analysis and Mining Journal.
May 2024: Our paper, "Decoding the Narratives: Analyzing Personal Drug Experiences On Reddit", is accepted to ACL2024 findings.
May 2024: We have five abstracts accepted to IC2S2 (two oral presentations and three posters)!
May 2024: Our paper "Examining Emotional Resonance and Shared Substance Use Experience of Euphoria Viewers on Reddit" is accepted to the 5th Workshop on Data For the Wellbeing of the Most Vulnerable at ICWSM.
Feb 2024: We are organizing the 1st workshop on "Reclaiming the Narrative: Digital Recovery, AI & Mitigating Harm in Social Media" @icwsm! Link: https://sites.google.com/view/reclaiming-the-narrative/
Feb 2024: New Paper accepted at LREC-COLING 2024 on the extraction of impact-relevant sections in scientific research.
Jan 2024: New Paper accepted at EACL 2024 on the analysis of narrativity in podcast data
November 2023: Talk at the AI and Global Data Governance Panel at Drexel's Global Studies and Modern Languages.
November 2023: Layla is presenting our work on analyzing drug experiences online at TADA 2023.
November 2023: Attending CRA-WP Early Career in Chicago in November.
Previous Announcements
Sep 2023: 🎉 We started the DONUTS 🍩 Colab with Afsaneh Razi and John Seberger :)
Sep 2023: New paper on Reddit Network and Drugs
Sep 2023: New paper on LLMs and User's Perceptions:
July 2023: Our paper "Exploring Moral Principles Exhibited in OSS: A Case Study on GitHub Heated Issues" is accepted to ACM FSE 2023.
July 2023: Our paper "Moving Beyond Stance Detection in Cross-cutting Communication Analysis" is accepted to SBP 2023.
May 2023: Our paper "The Evolution of Substance Use Coverage in the Philadelphia Inquirer" is accepted to ICWSM Data Challenge 2023.
April 2023: Our abstract "Global disparities in research contributing to SDGs: attention, funding, and leadership" is selected for presentation at the 2nd annual International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI).
April 2023: Our abstract "Real Talk: A Case Study on HBO's Euphoria Viewer Discourse on Substance Use" is accepted to IC2S2.
Jan 2023: Our paper "Enhancing structural balance theory and measurement to analyze signed digraphs of real-world organizational networks." is accepted to Frontiers in Human Dynamics
Aug 2022: Our paper "An expert-in-the-loop method for domain-specific document categorization based on small annotated data" is accepted to JASIS&T.
July 2022: Talk at Simons AI and Humanity Research Cluster at UC Berkeley
April 2022: ECIR 2022 Tutorial on" Information Extraction from Social Media" with Shubhanshu Mishra and Jana Diesner. https://socialmediaie.github.io/tutorials/ECIR2022/
March 2022: Our paper "What Makes a Good Podcast Summary?" is accepted to SIGIR 2022.
March 2022: I will attend Philadelphia WiDS as a Panelist
July 2021: I defended my Ph.D. I will join the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University this Fall as an Assistant Professor
July 2021: Our paper "Incorporating the Measurement of Moral Foundations Theory into Analyzing Stances on Controversial Topics" is accepted to HyperText 2021
June 2021: I will attend the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, Chicago.
May 2021: Our tutorials "PyNetworkshop: Analyzing the Structure of Networks in Python - The Essentials, Signed Networks, and Network Optimization" is accepted to the Networks 2021 and IC2S2 conferences
January 2021: Our work "Detecting Non-Topical Content in Podcasts" is accepted to EACL 2021
December 2020: Our tutorials "PyNetworkshop: Analyzing the Structure of Networks in Python - The Essentials, Signed Networks, and Network Optimization" and "Information extraction from social media: A hands-on tutorial on tasks, data, & open source tools" are accepted to the WebConf 2021
October 2020: I presented my research at the Second Consortium For Data Scientists in Training at the Michigan Institute for Data Science
October 2020: Our work "A domain-knowledge-based approach for extracting socio-environmental outcomes from project reports" is accepted to METRICS workshop at ASIS&T
October 2020: Our work "Which group do you belong to? Sentiment-based PageRank to measure formal and informal influence of nodes in networks" is accepted to Complex Networks
October 2020: Our work "100,000 Podcasts: A Large-Scale spoken English document corpus" is accepted to COLING
October 2020: Our paper "An empirical methodology for detecting and prioritizing needs during crisis events" is accepted to EMNLP findings
September 2020: Honored to receive the NCWIT/Bloomberg grant to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration.
August 2020: Our paper "Multilevel structural evaluation of signed directed social networks based on balance theory" is accepted by Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71838-6
August 2020: I will attend the ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium in October 2020.
July 2020: I will attend the CSCW Doctoral Consortium in October 2020.
June 2020: I am going to work at Spotify Research this summer as a research scientist intern, I'll work with the Language Technologies Lab.
May 2020: We have four extended abstracts accepted to IC2S2
February 2020: Our paper "Beyond Citation: Corpus-based Methods for Assessing the Impact of Research Outcomes on Society" has been accepted to @lrec2020
December 2019: Organizing the 2nd Workshop on Computational Impact Detection from Text Data @ LREC 2020; due: February 20th, 2020
December 2019: Organizing the first student poster session at WIDS UIUC , March 6 2020, NCSA
November 2019: I will be attending CSCW to present our work on morality and social movements
October 2019: I will attend GHC to present a poster at ACM SRC
August 2019: Our extended abstract on social movements and morality is accepted in CSCW 2019
June 2019: Going to NAACL 2019 to present our paper on morality and social effects
May 2019: My poster is accepted at GHC 2019 for the ACM Student Research Competition
April 2019: I am going to present our paper "Enhancing the measurement of social effects by capturing morality" at the Midwest Speech and Language Days
March 2019: Our work "Enhancing the measurement of social effects by capturing morality" is accepted in WASSA workshop co-located with NAACL 2019
March 2019: Our abstract has been accepted for the 2019 Sunbelt Conference in Montréal
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