I am a fourth-year Computer Science PhD candidate in Columbia University's Natural Language Text Processing Lab. My research interests broadly lie at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, linguistics, and the social sciences working toward more nuanced and improved understanding of attitudes in LLMs including the relationship between attitude expression and identity. I am grateful to be advised by Professor Kathleen McKeown, and I am generously supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Columbia Presidential Fellowship, and the Provost Diversity Fellowship.

Email: ndeas AT cs DOT columbia DOT edu
Office: Schapiro CEPSR 701
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Research Interests

Identity-based Biases in LLMs

Much of the text found online used for pre-training language models reflects particular forms of English, namely White Mainstream English, leading to models that are less capable of grappling with other language varieties of English, such as African American Language, or varieties of other languages. My work in this direction focuses on evaluating and mitigating linguistic biases to help create models capable of broadly understanding language across identities.

Modeling Social Psychology and Attitudes

As language models continue to be applied in psychological research and mental health settings, they must be capable of interpreting nuanced expressions of emotion or mental health. My work in this direction draws on theories and findings in social psychology to imbue models with better understanding of human expressions of attitudes and interpersonal behavior through language.

Modeling Political Perspectives and Polarization

With increased interaction on social media and a diverse array of media sources, it is important to ensure that language models fairly learn from and aid constructive public discourse. This research direction aims to develop systems capable of faithfully reasoning about group perspectives, fairly represent perspectives across groups, and develop approaches to better understand nuances of political speech and rhetoric, particularly online.

Selected Publications

[NLP: NLP and Computational Linguistics , P: Psychology, PS: Political Science]

[NLP,P] Artificial Impressions: Evaluating Large Language Model Behavior through the Lens of Trait Impressions

Nicholas Deas, Kathleen McKeown (EMNLP 2025)

[NLP] Data Caricatures: On the Representation of African American Language in Pretraining Corpora

Nicholas Deas*, Blake Vente*, Amith Ananthram, Jessi Grieser, Desmond Patton, Shana Kleiner, Jessi Grieser, James Shepard, Kathleen McKeown (ACL 2025)

[NLP,PS] Summarization of Opinionated Political Documents with Varied Perpsectives

Nicholas Deas, Kathleen McKeown (COLING 2025)

[NLP,P] MASIVE: Open-Ended Affective State Identification in English and Spanish

Nicholas Deas, Elsbeth Turcan, Iván Pérez Mejía, Kathleen McKeown (EMNLP 2024)

[NLP] PhonATe: Impact of Type-written Phonological Features of African American Language on Generative Language Modeling Tasks

Nicholas Deas, Jessi Grieser, Xinmeng Hou, Shana Kleiner, Tajh Martin, Sreya Nandanampati, Desmond U Patton, Kathleen McKeown (COLM 2024)

[PS] How Negativity and Policy Content Drive the Spread of Political Messages

Jeffrey A. Fine, D. Hudson Smith, Cierra Oliveira, Nicholas Deas, Spencer Shellnutt, Riley Stotzky, Rachel Clyburn (Journal of Information Technology & Politics)

[NLP] Evaluation of African American Language Bias in Natural Language Generation

Nicholas Deas, Jessi Grieser, Shana Kleiner, Desmond Patton, Elsbeth Turcan, Kathleen McKeown (EMNLP 2023)

[NLP,P] I just want to matter: Examining the role of anti-mattering in online suicide support communities using natural language processing

Nicholas Deas, Robin Kowalski, Sophie Finnell, Emily Radovic, Hailey Carroll, Chelsea Robbins, Andrew Cook, Kenzie Hurley, Natalie Cote, Kelly Evans, Isabella Lorenzo, Kelly Kiser, Gabriela Mochizuki, Meredith Mock, and Lyndsey Brewer (Computers in Human Behavior 2023)

[NLP, PS] Using Natural Language Processing to Automate Detection of Targeted Attacks in Political Tweets.

Nicholas Deas, Jacob Sargent, and Spencer Shellnut (MPSA 2019)