Email: sofias6[@]cs[●]washington[●]edu
How I pronounce my name (in English):
so-FEE-uh
ser-AWN-oh
Hello! I am a PhD candidate in
Computer Science & Engineering
(more specifically, in natural language processing) at the University of Washington, and am advised by
Noah Smith.
Before I came to UW, I was an undergrad at Carleton College
studying math and computer science.
My research mainly focuses on topics related to interpretability and explainability of natural language processing models, although I'm also interested in model evaluation and NLP for social science.
I'm also very interested in computer science education and AI literacy more broadly! If you're around UW and interested in similar topics, I'd really encourage you to come to the CS education seminar— in my experience, that's the most direct way to get looped into the broader CS education community at UW!
Research
- "Stubborn Lexical Bias in Data and Models."
Sofia Serrano, Jesse Dodge,
Noah A. Smith. ACL Findings 2023.
[publish-format pdf]
[screen-reader-friendly pdf]
[summary video]
- "Troubles in Text: Using Natural Language Processing to recognize government
rationalizations for human rights abuses."
Sarah K. Dreier,
Sofia Serrano, Emily K. Gade,
Noah A. Smith. Working paper.
- "All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text."
Elizabeth Clark,
Tal August, Sofia Serrano, Nikita Haduong,
Suchin Gururangan,
Noah A. Smith.
ACL 2021. Chosen as an outstanding paper.
[publish-format pdf]
[screen-reader-friendly pdf]
[recorded talk by Elizabeth]
- "Is Attention Interpretable?"
Sofia Serrano and
Noah A. Smith.
ACL 2019. [publish-format pdf]
[screen-reader-friendly pdf]
[recorded talk]
- "The partisan dimensions of religious rhetoric: Merging qualitative and natural language processing approaches to measure Congressional behavior." Sarah K. Dreier, Lucy H. Lin, Sofia Serrano, Emily K. Gade, Noah A. Smith. Working paper; presented at Text as Data (2018) & Conference on Politics and Computational Social Science (2019).
Teaching
- Spring 2023 — Gave two invited talks for the
UW Tacoma Computer Literacy
seminar series, the first on neural network fundamentals
[video] and the second on
large language models [video]
- Spring 2023 — Gave a talk on large language models for
UW CSE's Security Seminar
(590Y) [slide deck]
- Winter 2023 — I was the instructor of record for
CSE 447:
Natural Language Processing
- Autumn 2022 — Gave two guest lectures covering text classification for
CSE 447: Natural Language
Processing
- Winter 2022 — Gave a guest lecture on interpretability for NLP for
CSE 447/517:
Natural Language Processing
- Autumn 2021 — Gave a guest lecture on transformers and BERT for
POLS 585: Texts as Data (Emory University)
- Winter 2021 — Teaching Assistant for
CSE 447/517:
Natural Language Processing
- Winter 2020 — Teaching Assistant for CSE 517: Natural Language Processing
Misc
- Fall 2023 — Together with
Zander Brumbaugh and
Noah A. Smith, I wrote a guide on language models
called "Language Models:
A Guide for the Perplexed"
[pdf]
- Spring 2023 — I moderated a panel focused on demystifying ChatGPT for academics [video]