Rate My Professor Larry Birnbaum

Larry Birnbaum is Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. He earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University. Birnbaum joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His research and teaching focus on applied AI and human-AI collaboration. He and his students develop, study, and apply new technologies in natural language processing, conversational interfaces, intelligent information systems, social media data analytics, machine learning, and computational journalism and media. Key areas include methods for the automatic generation of content by machine, including the automatic generation of narratives from data, and natural human-AI collaboration via conversational interaction. His research also spans intelligent information systems, including models of automatic and contextual search and information diversity; preference prediction and recommendation using social media data; and applications of AI to journalism and media.

Birnbaum has contributed to numerous publications in these areas, including work on automatic narrative generation from data, analysis of social media for partisan content and voting behavior prediction, conversational recommendation systems, definition modeling for word embeddings, role detection in news articles, and multi-agent review generation for scientific papers. Selected publications include “Statsmonkey: Automatic generation of narrative from data” (2010), “Using explicit linguistic expressions of preference in social media to predict voting behavior” (2013, Best Paper Award), and recent papers on large language models for conversational systems and data analysis (2021–2025). He maintains affiliations with Northwestern’s Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence program.