Hello! I’m Rebecca Dorn (they/she), a fourth year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California’s Information Science Institute. I'm co-advised by Professors Kristina Lerman and Fred Morstatter. I research fairness in natural language processing and computational social science for social good. I'm particularly interested in understanding how technical tools amplify systems of inequity, and what can be done to mitigate the damage.

Lately, I've been focusing on how language models make sense of dialects used by historically marginalized groups. My recent work found a tendency for LLMs to erroneously flag texts from gender-queer individuals as harmful, with chain-of-thought prompting yielding limited improvement. If any of this sounds interesting to you, let's connect! Feel free to take a look at my academic CV and reach out to me at rdorn[at]usc[dot]edu.