Bei Yu
Professor | Program Director, Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology
320 Hinds Hall
315.443.3613
byu@syr.edu

Overview
My research areas are Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. More specifically, my research focuses on using machine learning and natural language processing techniques to improve information quality, organization and access, especially in the science and health domain. I am particularly interested in linguistic patterns that characterize people’s opinions, emotions, and language styles, and their roles in information representation and sharing in science literature, news and social media. My most recent work focuses on computational modeling of misinformation in science news. For example, I developed new methods for identifying exaggerated claims in science news by extracting and comparing claims from news articles and research papers. I also collaborate with social scientists to computationally operationalize social science theories and concepts to answer research questions in a variety of domains, such as political science, business, and mass communication. My work has been supported by funding sources including NSF, IMLS, and Microsoft.
Research
Courses Taught
- IST 736 – Text Mining (Professor of Record, 2014-current)
- IST 707 – Data Analytics (Professor of Record, 2011-2019)
- IST 700 – Deep Learning, NLP and Computational Social Science
- IST 777 – Statistical Methods in IST
- IST 659 – Data Administration Concepts and Database Management
- IST 552 – Information Systems Analysis
- IST 359 – Introduction to Database Management System
- IST 800 – Proseminar on Content Analysis
- IST 800 – Proseminar on Information Retrieval
- IST 800 – Proseminar on Text as Data