Research

My research focuses on computational social science approaches to studying internet censorship, political communication, and conflict. I use natural language processing and machine learning methods to analyze political phenomena.

Publications

ConfliBERT: Foundation Models for Political Violence Analysis

with Patrick T. Brandt, Sultan Alsarra, Vito D’Orazio, Dagmar Heintze, Latifur Khan, Javier Osorio, and Marcus Sianan
Political Analysis (R&R)

Developing specialized language models for political conflict analysis that outperform general-purpose LLMs like Gemma 2, Llama 3.1, and Qwen 2.5 in accuracy, precision, and recall while being hundreds of times faster. Link

ConflLlama: Domain-Specific Adaptation of Large Language Models for Political Violence Classification

with Patrick T. Brandt
Research & Politics (R&R)

Introducing ConflLlama, a specialized variant of Llama 3.1 fine-tuned for political conflict classification, demonstrating superior performance in event coding and conflict analysis tasks compared to traditional approaches. View Model on Hugging Face

Public Health Advocacy in Times of Pandemic: An Analysis of the Medicare-For-All Debate on Twitter During COVID-19

with Sushant Kumar & Pengfei Zhang
Behavioral Sciences

Analyzing how health advocacy groups adapted their Medicare-For-All messaging on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing distinct approaches to public engagement and narrative adaptation. Link

Under Review

Democracy and Internet Control: Theory and Evidence from Transparency Reports

with Pengfei Zhang

Examining how democratic and authoritarian regimes differ in their approach to internet content moderation, using data from transparency reports. We find that while both regime types remove similar amounts of content, their methods and motivations differ significantly. PDF

Two Types of Censorship? An Assessment of the Informational Autocracy Thesis

Testing how Guriev & Treisman’s Informational Autocracy theory applies to internet filtering practices in autocratic nations, with a focus on regime strategies and implementation methods. PDF

Working Papers

Populism and Investment Treaties

with Clint Peinhardt

Investigating how nationalist rhetoric influences countries’ decisions to exit international investment agreements.

IGO Withdrawal Networks

Extending Borzyskowski & Vabulas (2019) to examine network effects in international organization withdrawals.

Media Polarization in International News Coverage

with Arslan Khalid & Kiwan Park

Using machine learning to analyze ideological patterns in international news coverage across 200,000+ articles, examining shifts in sentiment and framing before and after the 2016 US election.

Event Horizon: Revolutionizing Data Annotation with Reinforcement Learning

Introducing a novel reinforcement learning framework built on deepseek’s GPRO, merging political science with advanced AI to create structured, transparent annotations for complex events.
View Model on Hugging Face

Dissertation

“Democracy and Internet Control: Electoral Accountability and Content Moderation”
View Proposal | Presentation

Resources

ConfliBERT Documentation

A comprehensive guide for political scientists on using and fine-tuning ConfliBERT for various NLP tasks.
View Manual