Staff profile

Shauna Concannon is an assistant professor in Computer Science (Digital Humanities) at Durham University, with research interests in computational linguistics, social interaction and human-computer interaction. Shauna’s work focuses on socio-technical understandings and ethical implications of technologies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, their work explores how information is communicated and how knowledge is linguistically encoded in an increasingly technologically-mediated society. 

Much of their work focuses on natural language processing applications such as text classification and dialogue systems. This encompasses studies of how information and opinion are shared and negotiated online, through to studies of how humans interact with AI systems. A current area of interest is the linguistic expression of harmful bias and prejudice in textual datasets, and what this means for developing equitable and socially just processes and systems.

Shauna started her academic life in the humanities, completing a masters in modernist literature at the University of Oxford before completing a PhD on deliberation in computer-mediated dialogue in the Computational Linguistics Lab, Queen Mary University of London. More recently, they completed postdoctoral research at the Universities of Cambridge, York and Newcastle, working on inequities and bias in language-based AI systems, intersectional approaches to data science and interactive video for human-data engagement.

• Computational social science
• Dialogue systems and conversational AI
• Digital Humanities
• Disagreement and conflict
• Disinformation / misinformation
• Empathy and emotion
• Feminist approaches to data science
• Generative AI
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Natural Language Processing
• Online deliberation and argumentation
• Online harms
• Participatory and human centred approaches
• Pragmatics
• Semantics
• Societal and ethical impacts of emerging technologies
• Sociolinguistics

Conference Paper

• Dow, A., Montague, K., Concannon, S., & Vines, J. (2022). Scaffolding Young People's Participation in Public Service Evaluation through Designing a Digital Feedback Process. . https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533463
• Concannon, S., Rajan, N., Shah, P., Smith, D., Ursu, M., & Hook, J. (2020). Brooke Leave Home: Designing a Personalized Film to Support Public Engagement with Open Data. . https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376462
• Ursu, M., Smith, D., Hook, J., Concannon, S., & Gray, J. (2020). Authoring Interactive Fictional Stories in Object-Based Media (OBM). . https://doi.org/10.1145/3391614.3393654
• Concannon, S. J., Balaam, M., Simpson, E., & Comber, R. (2018). Applying Computational Analysis to Textual Data from the Wild. . https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173800
• Concannon, S., Purver, M., & Healey, P. (2017). Opening Up and Closing Down Discussion: Experimenting with Epistemic Status in Conversation.
• Concannon, S., Healey, P., & Purver, M. (2016). How Natural is Argument in Natural dialogue?.
• Concannon, S., Healey, P., & Purver, M. (2015). Shifting Opinions: Experiments on Agreement and Disagreement in Dialogue.
• Concannon, S., Purver, M., & Healey, P. (2015). Taking a Stance: a Corpus Study of Reported Speech.
• Myketiak, C., Concannon, S., & Curzon, P. (2015). New/s Design: Informing Future Design Processes by Understanding Media Reporting of Medical Errors with Medical Devices [invited paper]. . https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261762
• Concannon, S., & Purver, M. (2014). Inferring Cultural Preference of Arts Audiences Through Twitter Data.

Journal Article

• Concannon, S., & Tomalin, M. (2023). Measuring perceived empathy in dialogue systems. AI and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01715-z
• Baker, H., Concannon, S., Meller, M., Cohen, K., Millington, A., Ward, S., & So, E. (2022). COVID-19 and Science Advice on the ‘Grand Stage’: The Metadata and Linguistic Choices in a Scientific Advisory Groups’ Meeting Minutes. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9, Article 465. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01403-1
• Chubb, J., Missaoui, S., Concannon, S., Maloney, L., & Walker, J. A. (2022). Interactive storytelling for children: A case-study of design and development considerations for ethical conversational AI. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.100403
• Baker, H., Concannon, S., & So, E. (2022). Information sharing practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study about face masks. PLoS ONE, 17(5), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268043
• Tomalin, M., Byrne, B., Concannon, S., Saunders, D., & Ullmann, S. (2021). The practical ethics of bias reduction in machine translation: why domain adaptation is better than data debiasing. Ethics and Information Technology, 23(3), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-021-09583-1
• Myketiak, C., Concannon, S., & Curzon, P. (2017). Narrative perspective, person references, and evidentiality in clinical incident reports. Journal of Pragmatics, 117, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.06.018