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. Broadly, I look to understand how natural language processing and social media information systems (1) amplify systems of inequity, and (2) what can be done to mitigate the damage. My research is rooted in the belief that this work must be done in partnerships with non-technical departments, communities and organizations.

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.