About
I'm a third-year PhD student in the Linguistics department at Northwestern University. My broad focus is computational sociolinguistics, with interests in natural language processing, social identity construction, and data science for social good. I'm advised by Rob Voigt and part of the Linguistic Mechanisms lab.
Education
Northwestern University, 2021-present
- Ph.D. Linguistics
- M.A. Linguistics (2021-2023)
- Certificate in Cognitive Science
The Ohio State University, 2017-2021
- B.A. Linguistics and Classics, summa cum laude
- Minors in Computer Science and Statistics
Publications & Presentations
Grace LeFevre. 2023. Constructions of whiteness in college students' conversations. Project Launch poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 51 Conference. [pdf]
Grace LeFevre, Micha Elsner, and Andrea D. Sims. 2021. Formalizing inflectional paradigm shape with information theory. Society for Computation in Linguistics 4.Current Projects
Evaluative expressions in letters of recommendation (Jan. 2022-present)
Utilizing a dataset of >125k letters of recommendation, I identified "evaluative expressions" as a novel linguistic component relevant to the core communicative purpose of the genre. I implemented a high-precision string-matching algorithm to identify these expressions in the letter text, then finetuned an LLM on the rule-based output to improve recall. Analysis of the results is ongoing, focused on examining the relationship between linguistic features of the evaluative expressions and admission outcomes.
Constructions of whiteness in college students' conversations (June 2023-present)
Using a combination of qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative linguistic measurements, I'm taking a bottom-up approach to understanding how college students construct their identities in semi-structured conversations. This is a Multimodal Interaction Lab study collecting data from multiple modalities including speech, gesture, and physiological monitors.