ABOUT

they/them | tmasis@cs.umass.edu | Semantic Scholar | LinkedIn | CV

I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised by Brendan O'Connor and supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I'm a member of the SLANG Lab and the larger UMass NLP group. I'm currently on the job market for positions starting fall/winter 2026, so please reach out if you think a position would be a good fit!

My research is in the domain of natural language processing and computational social science. In particular, I’m interested in developing methods for multilingual and/or user-generated text and in examining social phenomena in large-scale real-world data.

I also live with a chronic pain condition, which significantly impacts my life as well as my ability to work. Here are some resources on disability and why health/ability to be productive is morally neutral:
- What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
- Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
- Strategies for change: thriving as a disabled individual in STEMM
- The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
- Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
- The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship
- How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing

RESEARCH

Variation across Regions and Demographics in African American Language Morphosyntax: Evidence from Large-Scale Twitter Data.
Tessa Masis, Chloe Eggleston, Lisa Green, Taylor Jones, Meghan Armstrong, and Brendan O'Connor.
American Speech, 2026. [paper] [github]

Coordinates from Context: Using LLMs to Ground Complex Location References.
Tessa Masis and Brendan O'Connor.
EACL, 2026. [paper] [poster] [slides]

Global Racial Solidarity? (K-)Popularization, Changes, and Erasure in Transnational Movements of #StopAsianHate.
Jane Yeahin Pyo and Tessa Masis.
AoIR, 2025. [abstract]

Multilingualism, Transnationality, and K-pop in the Online #StopAsianHate Movement.
Tessa Masis, Zhangqi Duan, Weiai Xu, Jane Yeahin Pyo, Ethan Zuckerman, and Brendan O'Connor.
WebSci, 2025. [paper] [slides] [data]

Where on Earth Do Users Say They Are?: Geo-Entity Linking for Noisy Multilingual User Input.
Tessa Masis and Brendan O'Connor.
IC2S2, 2024. [abstract] [slides]
NLP+CSS Workshop at NAACL, 2024. [paper] [poster]

The Online #StopAsianHate Movement: More Global and BTS-Driven Than You'd Think.
Tessa Masis, Zhangqi Duan, Weiai Xu, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Ethan Zuckerman, Jane Yeahin Pyo, and Brendan O'Connor.
TADA, 2023. [abstract] [poster]

Investigating Morphosyntactic Variation in African American English on Twitter.
Tessa Masis, Chloe Eggleston, Lisa Green, Taylor Jones, Meghan Armstrong, and Brendan O'Connor.
SCiL, 2023. [abstract] [slides]
IC2S2, 2023. [abstract] [slides]

A large-scale Twitter-based exploration of morphosyntactic geographic variation in African American English.
Tessa Masis, Chloe Eggleston, Anissa Neal, Lisa Green, and Brendan O'Connor.
NWAV50, 2022. [abstract] [slides]

Corpus-Guided Contrast Sets for Morphosyntactic Feature Detection in Low-Resource English Varieties.
Tessa Masis, Anissa Neal, Lisa Green, and Brendan O'Connor.
Field Matters Workshop at COLING, 2022. [paper] [poster] [slides] [github]

ProSPer: Probing Human and Neural Network Language Model Understanding of Spatial Perspective.
Tessa Masis and Carolyn Jane Anderson.
BlackboxNLP Workshop at EMNLP, 2021. [paper] [poster]

Can neural network language models learn spatial perspective from text alone?
Carolyn Jane Anderson and Tessa Masis.
Bridging AI and Cognitive Science (BAICS) Workshop at ICLR, 2020. [paper]

The Poetics of Gender Devaluation in Homeric Heroism.
Tessa Masis.
Scholarship for Undergraduate Literary Studies conference, 2020. [paper]

TEACHING

Spring 2022:
COMPSCI 220 Programming Methodology (Teaching Assistant)

Fall 2020:
Developed culturally sustaining assessment tools (CSAT) for computational thinking in early elementary students (in collaboration with PIs of related NSF-funded research project)

Fall 2019:
COMPSCI 220 Programming Methodology (Undergraduate Teaching Assistant)