UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Shomir Wilson, assistant professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, is the recipient of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation in recognition of his work, “Large-Scale Exploration and Interpretation of Consumer-Oriented Legal Documents.”
The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. The award will provide five years of funding to support Wilson’s research aimed at making consumer oriented legal documents — or COLDs — more useful and actionable for users.
COLDs — such as terms of service agreements, health care agreements, and privacy policies — often must be accepted by consumers before they can use a product or secure a service. These texts are typically unengaging and are mostly designed to ensure the legality of the agreement between user and provider, said Wilson.
“I am honored to be recognized by the NSF for this award, and I’m excited for the momentum it gives to a project I’ve been working on for several years,” said Wilson. “It's also a recognition of the importance of the problem that walls of text create for people and their everyday lives, and the potential for language technologies to make a difference.”
According to Wilson people often accept these agreements without reading or understanding them. This lack of understanding disempowers individuals and affects them unequally.
The project will develop methods in natural language processing — a field of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand and process human language — to gather COLDs and extract relevant details about statements that deviate from text based on similar documents, as well as the choices users can make based on the text. Ultimately, Wilson hopes to create practical tools like browser extensions that will help consumers identify these choice points and outlier statements when reviewing agreements.
“Through my prior research on privacy policies, we found that people often make better choices when they have a better understanding of the agreement and their choices. I believe this work will extend these actions to similar agreements, leaving them more informed about which products and services they want to interact with,” he explained. “It’s about consumer empowerment.”
Wilson, who joined the College of IST in 2018, has research interests spanning natural language processing, privacy, security, and computational social science. He is the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab and an affiliate of both the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.
He earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science, mathematics, and philosophy from Virginia Tech, and both master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland.