Research

Justin Lee, Tuomas Oikarinen, Arjun Chatha, Keng-Chi Chang, Yilan Chen, Tsui-Wei (Lily) Weng (2023). The Importance of Prompt Tuning for Automated Neuron Explanations. NeurIPS 2023 Workshop ATTRIB, Accepted.

• Study neuron-level explanability by prompting LLMs with activated patterns.
• Evaluate different prompting methods with both machine & humans.

Keng-Chi Chang (2023). Do Imageries Lend Credibility to News Articles?. Working Paper.

• Varies image treatment while holding fixed other aspects of news articles.
• Overall presence of image does not always increase credibility perception.
• Images with some identified latent treatments (such as photos from press conferences, comics, or visuals of male suits) can alter credibility perception.

Keng-Chi Chang, Cody Buntain (2023). Characterizing Image Sharing Behaviors in US Politically Engaged, Random, and Demographic Audience Segments. PhoMemes Workshop of 2023 AAAI ICWSM.

• Collect images shared by political & random Twitter users.
• Study how sharing different types of images are predictive of demographic attributes.

Keng-Chi Chang, Victor Shih, Hans H. Tung (2023). Compensation and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Power: Evidence from China’s 2016 PLA Reform. Working Paper.

• Collect large-scale biographical panel data of PLA officers.
• Estimate patterns for promotion within PLA before/after PLA reform.
• Finds that Xi only started to promote followers after power consolidation.

Keng-Chi Chang (2022). Mapping Visual Themes among Authentic and Coordinated Memes. PhoMemes Workshop of 2022 AAAI ICWSM.

• Collect coordinated IRA memes from Twitter and authentic memes from Reddit.
• Cluster memes to find visual themes using self-supervised transfer learning.
• Coordinated and authentic memes share visual themes but with different emphasis.

Keng-Chi Chang, William R. Hobbs, Margaret E. Roberts, Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld (2021). COVID-19 Increased Censorship Circumvention And Access To Sensitive Topics In China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Use geolocated Tweets from China during the COVID-19 crisis.
• Show that crisis motivates citizens to seek out sensitive information.
• Gateway to both current and historically sensitive content is not found in countries without extensive online censorship.

Victoria Asbury, Keng-Chi Chang, Kevin Munger, Katherine McCabe, Tiago Ventura (2021). The Effect of Streaming Chat on Perceptions of Debates. Journal of Communication.

• Asks whether social chats on livestreams affect debate viewing.
• Assign subjects to watch debates on ABC, Facebook Live, and 538.
• Democratic subjects assigned to the Facebook chat condition reported lower affect towards Democrats and a worse viewing experience.
• The tone of candidate-directed comments also matter.

Keng-Chi Chang, Ming-Jen Lin, Chun-Fang Chiang (2021). Using Facebook Data to Predict the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. PLOS One.

• Use 19 billion likes to measure dynamic ideological positions of users and fan pages.
• Guess user’s geolocation by likes and measure state level support rates for candidates.
• Assume that users would support candidates with closer ideology.
• FB support rates predict election outcome well, and share similar trends with polls.
• Polls systematically overestimate Clinton’s support in right-leaning states.

Tiago Ventura, Kevin Munger, Katherine McCabe, Keng-Chi Chang (2021). Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.

• Collect streaming chats of US Presidential debates on Facebook Live.
• Describe their dynamics, degrees of toxicity, and insults.

Keng-Chi Chang (2017). Social Mobility in Ming China: Evidence from Twelve Thousand Chin-shih Data. Working Paper.

• Challenge the conventional wisdom that civil service exam was meritocratic.
• Use detailed data of past 3 generations to estimate the effect of family background on tests.
• Multi-staged examination structure provides chances to partially control for ability.