Maarten Sap

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margin-bottom: 2em;"> <a class="btn btn-light" href="http://twitter.com/maartensap" target="_blank"> <img src="images/twitter-icon.png" class="icon" title="Twitter Profile" alt="Twitter Profile"> </a> <a class="btn btn-light" href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gFN4QUYAAAAJ&hl=en" target="_blank"> <img src="images/google-scholar-icon.png" class="icon" title="Google Scholar Profile" alt="Google Scholar Profile"> </a> <a class="btn btn-light" href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Maarten-Sap/2729164" target="_blank"> <img src="images/s2-logo-bw.png" class="icon" title="Semantic Scholar Profile" alt="Semantic Scholar Profile"> </a> </div> <div class="col-lg-9 col-md-9 col-sm-12 lead" style="padding-right:0px;"> <h2 class="display-4">Maarten Sap</h2> <p> I am an assistant professor at <a href="https://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/" target="_blank">CMU's LTI</a> department with a courtesy appointment in <a href="https://hcii.cmu.edu/">HCII</a>, and a part-time research scientist at the <a href="https://allenai.org" target="_blank">Allen Institute for AI (AI2)</a>. My research focuses on endowing NLP systems with <strong>social intelligence and social commonsense</strong>, and understanding <strong>social inequality and bias</strong> in language. </p> <p> Before this, I was a Postdoc/Young Investigator at the <a href="https://allenai.org" target="_blank">Allen Institute for AI (AI2)</a>, working on project <a target="_blank" href="https://allenai.org/commonsense/">Mosaic</a>. I received my PhD from the University of Washington where I was advised by <a target="_blank" href="https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~nasmith/">Noah Smith</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yejin/">Yejin Choi</a>, and have interned at AI2 working on social commonsense reasoning, and at Microsoft Research working on deep learning models for understanding human cognition. <br><a href="bio.html" style="font-size: .95rem;">[bio for talks]</a> </p>  </div> <div class="col-12" style="background: white; padding: 4px; border-radius: 5px 5px; font-size: 1.15rem; font-weight: 300;"> <h5><em>Recent updates:</em></h5> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>November 2024</em></strong> 🫂👨‍🏫: Very excited that I now have a courtesy appointment in the <a target="_blank" href="https://hcii.cmu.edu/">Human Computer Interaction Institute</a>!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>November 2024</em></strong> 🔍🧑‍🎓: As a reminder, due to my lab being quite full already, I'm not taking any students in this upcoming PhD application cycle 😟.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>November 2024</em></strong> 🏖️📚: Excited to give a talk at the <a target="_blank" href="https://sites.google.com/cs.stonybrook.edu/wnu2024">6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding</a> on <em>Computational Methods of Social Causes and Effects of Stories</em>.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>November 2024</em></strong> 🏖️🐊: Excited to attend <a target="_blank" href="https://2024.emnlp.org/">EMNLP</a> in Miami, where my students will be presenting their papers: <a target="_blank" href="https://joelmire.notion.site/">Joel Mire</a> on <a target="_blank" href="https://maartensap.com/publications.html#mire2024empirical"><em>The Empirical Variability of Narrative Perceptions of Social Media Texts</em></a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://jocelynshen.com/">Jocelyn Shen</a> on <a target="_blank" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17633"><em>HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs</em></a>, and <a target="_blank" href="https://xuhuizhou.github.io/">Xuhui Zhou</a> on <a target="_blank" href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05020"><em>Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs</em></a>.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>November 2024</em></strong> 🧑‍🎓👨🏼‍🏫: Giving a talk at the University of Pittsburgh CS colloquium on <em>Artificial Social Intelligence? On the challenges of Socially Aware and Ethically informed LLMs</em> (Fall 2024 version). Recording is on <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/wiGctXJAKcc">Youtube</a>.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>October 2024</em></strong> 🗽🦁: Giving a talk in the Columbia NLP seminar on <em>Artificial Social Intelligence? On the challenges of Socially Aware and Ethically informed LLMs</em> (Fall 2024 version).</p> <p style="margin-bottom: .5em;"><em><strong>October 2024</em></strong> 🔔: Excited to attend <a target="_blank" href="https://colmweb.org/">COLM</a> at UPenn in Philadelphia, and re-visiting my old haunts around UPenn (from 10 years ago).</p>  <p><small style="font-weight: 300;"><a target="_blank" href="news.html">[older news]</a></small></p> </div> </div> </div> <hr>     <div class="row"> <div class="col-12" id="research-group"> <h2>My research group:</h2> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/dan-chechelnitsky.png"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://chechelnitskd.github.io/">Dan Chechelnitsky</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI PhD student <br><small>co-advised with <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S5NGkFsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">Chrysoula Zerva</a></small></h5> </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/joel-mire.jpg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://joelmire.notion.site/">Joel Mire</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI MLT student </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/karina-halevy.jpg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://enscma2.github.io/">Karina Halevy</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI PhD student <br><small>co-advised with <a href="https://scholar.google.com.vn/citations?user=-y6SIhQAAAAJ&hl=vi">Mona Diab</a></small> </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/jimin-mun.jpeg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://jiminmun.github.io/">Jimin Mun</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI PhD student </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/jocelyn-shen.jpg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://jocelynshen.com/">Jocelyn Shen</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> MIT PhD student <br><small>co-advised with <a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/people/cynthiab/overview/">Cynthia Breazeal</a></small> </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/akhila-yerukola.jpg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://akhila-yerukola.github.io/" target="_blank">Akhila Yerukola</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI PhD student </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/mingqian-zheng.jpg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://eeelisa.github.io/" target="_blank">Mingqian Zheng</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI PhD student <br><small>co-advised with <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cprose/">Carolyn Rosé</a></small> </p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-lg-3 col-xl-3 col-sm-4 col-md-4"> <div class="card no-border"> <img class="card-img-profile" src="images/students/xuhui-zhou.jpg"/> <div class="card-body text-center"> <h5 class="card-title"><a href="https://xuhuizhou.github.io/" target="_blank">Xuhui Zhou</a></h5> <p class="card-text font-italic"> LTI PhD student </p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <hr> <div class="row"> <div class="col-12"> <h2>Overarching Research Themes</h2> </div> <div class="col-12" id="content"> *Extracted by GPT-4, there may be inconsistencies.* #### *Ethics in AI Development* My research group explores the complex dimensions of ethical AI and its implications for society. One of our pivotal works, [HAICOSYSTEM: An Ecosystem for Sandboxing Safety Risks in Human-AI Interactions](http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16427), introduces a framework designed to simulate potential safety risks associated with human-AI interactions. We also investigate the balance between usability and ethical considerations through our paper, [AI-LieDar: Examine the Trade-off Between Utility and Truthfulness in LLM Agents](https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09013), which highlights the dilemmas faced by LLMs in delivering truthful responses. Our efforts culminate in [Particip-AI: A Democratic Surveying Framework](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14791) that aims to engage a broader audience in discussions of future AI applications and their impacts. #### *Narrative Dynamics in AI* My research group explores the way narratives are constructed and perceived through AI technologies. We delve into emotional resonance in storytelling with our important study, [HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17633), which examines how narrative styles can evoke empathy. Additionally, our work, [Modeling Empathic Similarity in Personal Narratives](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14246), quantifies connections between audiences and narratives, enriching our understanding of storytelling mechanics. Another significant contribution, [Quantifying the narrative flow of imagined versus autobiographical stories](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211715119), provides insights into how different types of personal stories affect listener engagement. #### *Social Intelligence and Simulation* My research group explores how social intelligence can be embedded and evaluated in language models. We critically assess the limitations of simulating genuine interpersonal engagements in our study, [Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs](http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05020), which reveals the gaps between simulated responses and authentic human communication. To foster more effective models, we research the efficacy of context in understanding social dynamics through [Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14763). Our ongoing efforts also led to [SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11667), which advances the measures of social reasoning capabilities among AI agents. #### *Addressing Toxic Language* My research group explores the pressing challenges in mitigating toxic language generation within AI systems. We highlight multilingual aspects of this issue with our notable study, [PolygloToxicityPrompts: Multilingual Evaluation of Neural Toxic Degeneration in Large Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09373), which scrutinizes how toxic content manifests across languages. Another critical observation is presented in [Counterspeakers’ Perspectives: Unveiling Barriers and AI Needs in the Fight against Online Hate](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00179), offering insights into the requirements for combating hate speech effectively. Additionally, our work, [Leftover-Lunch: Advantage-based Offline Reinforcement Learning for Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14718), investigates reinforcement learning strategies to enhance ethical dialogue generation. </div>  </div>  <div class="row" style="margin-top: 20px;"> <div class="col-12"><h3>More about me</h3></div> <div class="col-12 btn-toolbar"role="toolbar"> <div class="btn-group mr-2"> <a href="publications.html" class="btn btn-light">Browse my publications</a> </div> <div class="btn-group mr-2"> <a href="contact.html" class="btn btn-light">Contact me</a> </div> <div class="btn-group mr-2"> <a href="aboutme.html" class="btn btn-light">More about me</a> </div> <div class="btn-group mr-2"> <a href="cv.html" class="btn btn-light" target="_blank"> CV</a> </div> </div> </div> </div>     </div> </div> </body>  <footer class="footer"> <hr> <div style="width:99%">   <div class="row"> <div class="col-2"> </div> <div class="col-8 text-center"> <img src="images/LTI-logo.png" style="width:300px; margin-bottom: 20px;"> </div> <div class="col-2 mb-1"> <div class="text-muted small" style="font-style: italic; text-align: right;"> Last updated: <br> 2024-11-22 </div> </div> </div> </div> </footer> </html> <script> document.getElementById('content').innerHTML = marked.parse(document.getElementById('content').innerHTML); </script> <style> .card { padding: 0px; margin: 10px 5px; } .card-img-profile { margin: auto; border-radius: .25em; max-height: 300px; max-width: 300px; height: 100%; width: 100%; } .card-img-top { max-height: 170px; max-width: 70%; width: auto; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; } .btn { margin-top: .2em; } .profile { border-radius: .1em; box-shadow: 0 4px 8px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2), 0 6px 20px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.19); } .no-border{ border: none; } </style>

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