Christina Chance

PhD Candidate in Computer Science, UCLA

cchance [at] cs.ucla.edu

I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at UCLA, advised by Kai-Wei Chang in the UCLA NLP Lab. I am supported by the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship and the GEM Fellowship Program.

My research asks how language technologies can support cultural pluralism. I develop computational methods to model, evaluate, and audit these systems under social and linguistic variation, treating disagreement, dialect, and context as signal to model rather than noise to resolve. I study how models represent differences in human judgment, how dominant linguistic norms shape model behavior, and what evidence is needed to show that a system works reliably for the people it affects. My work combines natural language processing (NLP) with computational social science and digital ethnography to make these differences measurable and to carry them into how systems are designed.

I am also invested in teaching and in my department. As a UCLA teaching fellow, I am designing and teaching an original undergraduate course, AI, Power, and Society, and as the department's TA Coordinator I help train incoming teaching assistants. I chair the Computer Science Graduate Student Association, Graduate Women in Computer Science, and the Chancellor's Student Fee Advisory Committee.

Before UCLA, I received my B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Emory University.

On the job market. I am seeking tenure-track assistant professor roles in CS and iSchools, and postdoctoral positions. I graduate in June 2027.

Beyond research, I love community service and watching anime.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution.

Content Moderation and Online Safety

Policy Over Purpose: Auditing LLM Content Moderation of Reclaimed Slur Usage Under review Christina Chance, Kai-Wei Chang
IYKYK (But AI Doesn't): Automated Content Moderation Does Not Capture Communities' Heterogeneous Attitudes Towards Reclaimed Language Under review Christina Chance, Rebecca Pattichis, Arjun Subramonian, James He, Shruti Narayanan, Saadia Gabriel, Kai-Wei Chang arXiv Paper Code
No Convo! The Illusion of Reliability in Online Toxicity Detection Rachita Rajesh, Christina Chance, Ashima Suvarna, Kai-Wei Chang, Saadia Gabriel Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL, 2026 Paper Poster
Re-imagining Virtual Communities: Ethical Guidelines for Studying Black Twitter Christina Chance, Kai-Wei Chang AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2025 Paper Poster
ModelCitizens: Representing Community Voices in Online Safety Ashima Suvarna, Christina Chance, Karolina Naranjo, Hamid Palangi, Sophie Hao, Thomas Hartvigsen, Saadia Gabriel Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025 Paper Poster
Leveraging Large Language Models and Topic Modeling for Toxicity Classification Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie, Christina Chance, Claire Huang, Margaret Capetz, Elizabeth Eyeson, Majid Sarrafzadeh International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), 2025 Paper

Bias and Fairness in AI

Will the Prince Get True Love's Kiss? On the Model Sensitivity to Gender Perturbation over Fairytale Texts Christina Chance, Da Yin, Dakuo Wang, Kai-Wei Chang TrustNLP Workshop at NAACL, 2025 Paper Poster
Survey of Bias in Text-to-Image Generation: Definition, Evaluation, and Mitigation Yixin Wan, Arjun Subramonian, Anaelia Ovalle, Zongyu Lin, Ashima Suvarna, Christina Chance, Hritik Bansal, Rebecca Pattichis, Kai-Wei Chang arXiv Paper

Dialectal Bias for African American English

Reinforcing Stereotypes of Anger: Emotion AI on African American Vernacular English Under review Rebecca Dorn, Christina Chance, Casandra Rusti, Charles Bickham Jr, Kai-Wei Chang, Fred Morstatter, Kristina Lerman arXiv Paper
An Analysis of Large Language Models for African American English Speaking Children's Oral Language Assessment Alexander Johnson, Christina Chance, Kaycee Stiemke, Hariram Veeramani, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Abeer Alwan Journal of Black Excellence in Engineering, Science, & Technology, Vol. 1 Paper
CORAAL QA: A Dataset and Framework for Open Domain Spontaneous Speech Question Answering from Long Audio Files Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Alexander Johnson, Christina Chance, Hariram Veeramani, Abeer Alwan IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2024 Paper
Zoom Audio Transcription Accuracy for African American Vernacular English Christina Chance, Dorian Arnold Honors Thesis, Emory University (High Honors) Paper

NLP for Social Sciences

Tradeoffs in Automating the Annotation of In-Custody Death Records with Large Language Models Under review Christina Chance, Grace Sosa, Kai-Wei Chang, Terence Keel
Research Domain Criteria and Deaths by Suicide in the National Violent Death Reporting System Susan D. Cochran, Christina Chance, Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Bruce Cuthbert, Vickie M. Mays JAMA Network Open Paper
Measuring Narrative Complexity Among Suicide Deaths in the National Violent Death Reporting System (2003–2021 NVDRS) Christina Chance, Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Vickie M. Mays, Kai-Wei Chang, Susan D. Cochran MDPI Information Paper
Leveraging Language Models to Detect Greenwashing Avalon Vinella*, Margaret Capetz*, Rebecca Pattichis*, Christina Chance*, Reshmi Ghosh arXiv Paper

HCI and Design

Surprising Personas: Persona Sets with Controllably Unexpected Features Christina Chance, Jennifer Healey ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts (CHI EA), 2026 Paper Code Poster

Training Programs

Cohort member of the 2025 AIM-AHEAD & NCATS Health Data Science Training Program. My team's project, Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Clinical Prediction of 60-Day Mortality in Respiratory Infection (RI) with Smoking History: A Retrospective Cohort Study, received the Top Oral Presentation, Instructor's Choice Award.

Teaching

Teaching Fellowship

2026–27
AI, Power, and Society Original course Collegium of University Teaching Fellows (CUTF), UCLA
Designing and teaching an original undergraduate writing course, offered for writing credit, on how AI systems exercise and reshape social and political power. Students draw on social computing and digital ethnography and apply NLP approaches to study these tools across fields.

Teaching Assistantships

Fall 2025 & 2026
CS 495 Teaching Assistant Training Seminar TA Coordinator Prof. Sandra Batista, UCLA
Worked with about 75 students and future TAs per term. Graded assignments, handled course logistics, provided feedback to new TAs, and hosted office hours.
Summer 2026
CS 32 Introduction to Computer Science II Prof. Bruce Huang, UCLA
Worked with about 180 students. Led discussion sections, hosted office hours, and assisted in grading exams.
Winter & Spring 2025
CS 131 Programming Languages Prof. Paul Eggert, UCLA
Worked with 1 other TA, 4 LAs, and 120 to 180 students per term. Graded assignments and exams, led weekly discussion sections, and hosted office hours.
Fall 2024
CS 180 Introduction to Algorithms and Complexity Prof. Alexis Korb & Prof. Glenn Reinman, UCLA
Worked with 2 other TAs and about 240 students. Graded assignments and exams, led weekly discussion sections, and hosted office hours.
Winter & Spring 2024
CS 162 & CS 263 Natural Language Processing Prof. Nanyun (Violet) Peng, UCLA
Worked with 1 to 3 other TAs and 110 to 130 students per term. Created and graded assignments, exams, and course projects, led discussion sections, and hosted office hours.
Fall 2023
CS 30 Principles and Practices of Computing Prof. Todd Millstein, UCLA
Worked with 1 other TA, 2 LAs, and about 120 students. Graded assignments, led weekly discussion sections, and hosted office hours.
Spring 2022
CS 377 Database Systems Prof. Nosayba El-Sayed, Emory University
Worked with 1 other TA and about 40 students. Graded assignments and hosted office hours.

Talks and Guest Lectures

Fall 2026
UCLA Natural Language Seminar Series Invited Talk, UCLA
Summer 2026
Black Futures in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Invited Talk, Wilfandel Club House, Los Angeles
A fireside chat with an audience of Black women on how emerging AI systems affect Black communities.
Summer 2026
Introduction to Computational Art Guest Instructor, Hartford Youth Scholars
Designed and taught a short introductory course for middle school students.
Spring 2026
Anthro 259 Ethnography in Technology Guest Lecture, UCLA
Lectured on the failure modes of large language models that disproportionately affect marginalized communities and their relation to content moderation.
Fall 2024
MARS Lab Invited Talk, UCLA
Presented preliminary work on IYKYK and on bias in AAVE emotion detection.
Fall 2024
Fairness and Bias Seminar Invited Talk, USC Information Sciences Institute
Presented preliminary findings from IYKYK.

Tutoring

Spring 2025
Ignite Fellow Teach For America
Tutored 4 eighth grade students in math four times a week in preparation for their state exam.

Service and Leadership

Chair, Chancellor's Student Fee Advisory Committee, UCLA, 2026–present (Member, 2024–26)
Chair, Computer Science Graduate Student Association, UCLA, 2024–present
Chair, Graduate Women in Computer Science, UCLA, 2022–present
TA Coordinator, UCLA Computer Science Department, 2025–27