Rob Voigt

robvoigt@ucdavis.edu

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Hi there!

I’m a computational sociolinguist at UC Davis Linguistics, where I direct the Linguistic Mechanisms Lab. I recently moved from Northwestern Linguistics; students interested in working with me should apply to UC Davis.

I’m interested in natural language processing, social meaning, sociophonetics and interactional variation, Chinese and Japanese linguistics, gesture and embodiment, and applications of linguistic research to social good. I’m particularly interested in using computational methods to understand the linguistic mechanisms of social problems in domains like policing, gun violence, immigration, and mental health.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you around!

—Rob

Publications

2026

Quantifying racial disparities in media representations of gun violence at scale.
Ruth Bagley, Susan Burtner, Andrew V. Papachristos, and Rob Voigt.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [data and code]
The Pragmatic Mind of Machines: Tracing the Emergence of Pragmatic Competence in Large Language Models.
Kefan Yu, Qingcheng Zeng, Weihao Xuan, Wanxin Li, Jingyi Wu, and Rob Voigt.
Forthcoming in Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026). [data, code]
Language Choice in Nigerian Social Media Hate Speech.
Nneoma Udeze and Rob Voigt.
Forthcoming in Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, AfricaNLP Workshop.
A multi-method phenotypic study of sex differences in pragmatic language in autism.
Emily Landau, Sarah Ethridge Brooks, Janna Guilfoyle, Kritika Nayar, Stephanie Crawford, Jiayin Xing, Joseph C.Y. Lau, Gary E Martin, Rob Voigt, Latha Valluripalli Soorya, and Molly Losh.
Forthcoming in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Schizophrenia Stigma in News Media: A Comprehensive Natural Language Processing Approach.
Luz Maria Alliende, Rob Voigt, Jason Schiffman, and Vijay Mittal.
Forthcoming in Schizophrenia Bulletin.

2025

Transgressing the binary: A computational approach to gendered reference.
Michael Senko and Rob Voigt.
In S. Burnett & F. Vigo (Eds.), Battlefield linguistics. DeGruyter Mouton.
Sympathy over Polarization: A Computational Discourse Analysis of Social Media Posts about the July 2024 Trump Assassination Attempt.
Qingcheng Zeng, Guanhong Liu, Zhaoqian Xue, Diego Ford, Rob Voigt, Loni Hagen, and Lingyao Li.
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL 2025).
Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?
Grace LeFevre, Qingcheng Zeng, Adam Leif, Jason Jewell, Denis Peskoff, and Rob Voigt.
Proceedings of Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025). [code and data]
Thinking Out Loud: Do Reasoning Models Know When They’re Right?
Qingcheng Zeng, Weihao Xuan, Leyang Cui, and Rob Voigt.
Proceedings of Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025).
Leveraging Human Production-Interpretation Asymmetries to Test LLM Cognitive Plausibility.
Suet-Ying Lam, Qingcheng Zeng, Jingyi Wu, and Rob Voigt.
Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025).
Body Camera Footage as Data: Using Natural Language Processing to Capture Policing At Scale and In Depth.
Nicholas P. Camp and Rob Voigt.
Behavioral Science & Policy.
Pre-trained artificial intelligence language model represents pragmatic language variability central to autism and genetically related phenotypes.
Joseph C.Y. Lau, Emily Landau, Qingcheng Zeng, Ruichun Zhang, Stephanie Crawford, Rob Voigt, and Molly Losh.
Autism.

2024

Adaptive Axes: A Pipeline for In-domain Social Stereotype Analysis.
Qingcheng Zeng, Mingyu Jin, and Rob Voigt.
Proceedings of Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024).
Causal Micro-Narratives.
Mourad Heddaya, Qingcheng Zeng, Chenhao Tan, Rob Voigt, and Alexander Zentefis.
Proceedings of Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing, Workshop on Narrative Understanding (WNU 2024).
Leveraging body-worn camera footage to assess effects of training on officer communication during traffic stops.
Nicholas P. Camp*, Rob Voigt*, MarYam G. Hamedani, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
PNAS Nexus.
A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics.
Lucas Zurbuchen and Rob Voigt.
Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Student Research Workshop (ACL SRW 2024). [data and code]

2023

The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century.
Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Peter Catron, Dylan Connor and Rob Voigt.
Sociological Science.
The Language of Bargaining.
Mourad Heddaya, Solomon Dworkin, Chenhao Tan, Rob Voigt, and Alexander Zentefis.
Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023) [video, data]
Large Language Models Are Partially Primed in Pronoun Interpretation.
Suet-Ying Lam, Qingcheng Zeng, Kexun Zhang, Chenyu You and Rob Voigt.
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023 Findings). [code]
GreenPLM: Cross-Lingual Transfer of Monolingual Pre-Trained Language Models at Almost No Cost.
Qingcheng Zeng, Lucas Garay, Peilin Zhou, DaDing Chong, Yining Hua, Jiageng Wu, Yikang Pan, Han Zhou, Rob Voigt, and Jie Yang.
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023) [code]

2022

Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration.
Dallas Card, Serina Chang, Chris Becker, Julia Mendelsohn, Rob Voigt, Leah Boustan, Ran Abramitzky, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [data and code]

2021

The Thin Blue Waveform: Racial Disparities in Officer Prosody Undermine Institutional Trust in the Police.
Nicholas P. Camp, Rob Voigt, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Show Older Papers

2019

Analyzing Polarization in Social Media: Method and Application to Tweets on 21 Mass Shootings.
Dorottya Demszky, Nikhil Garg, Rob Voigt, James Zou, Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2019). [code]

2018

RtGender: A Corpus of Responses to Gender for Studying Gender Bias.
Rob Voigt, David Jurgens, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Dan Jurafsky, and Yulia Tsvetkov.
Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018). [data]

2017

Language from Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect.
Rob Voigt, Nicholas P. Camp, Vinodumar Prabhakaran, William L. Hamilton, Rebecca C. Hetey, Camilla M. Griffiths, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

2016

Cans and Cants: Computational Potentials for Multimodality with a Case Study in Head Position.
Rob Voigt, Penelope Eckert, Dan Jurafsky, and Robert J. Podesva.
Journal of Sociolinguistics. [code]
Between- and Within-Speaker Effects of Bilingualism on F0 Variation.
Rob Voigt, Dan Jurafsky, and Meghan Sumner.
Proceedings of Interspeech.

2015

The Connection Between Smiling and GOAT Fronting: Embodied Affect in Sociophonetic Variation.
Robert J. Podesva, Patrick Callier, Rob Voigt, and Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 18.
The Users Who Say “Ni”: Audience Identification in Chinese-language Restaurant Reviews.
Rob Voigt and Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2015). [data]

2014

Two Knives Cut Better Than One: Chinese Word Segmentation with Dual Decomposition.
Mengqiu Wang, Rob Voigt, and Christopher D. Manning.
Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014).
Speaker Movement Correlates with Prosodic Indicators of Engagement.
Rob Voigt, Robert J. Podesva, and Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of Speech Prosody 7. (2nd Place Best Paper Award.) [code]

2013

Feature-Rich Phrase-based Translation: Stanford University’s Submission to the WMT 2013 Translation Task.
Spence Green, Daniel Cer, Kevin Reschke, Rob Voigt, John Bauer, Sida Wang, Natalia Silveira, Julia Neidert, and Christopher D. Manning.
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT 2013).
Tradition and Modernity in 20th Century Chinese Poetry.
Rob Voigt and Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLfL 2013). [code]

2012

Towards a Literary Machine Translation: The Role of Referential Cohesion.
Rob Voigt and Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (CLFL 2012).