Ruth Bagley

3rd Year Linguistics PhD Student
Northwestern University

About Me

I'm an interactional sociolinguist in the third year of my Linguistics PhD program at Northwestern University, working with Annette D'Onofrio and Rob Voigt. My main research interest is understanding how miscommunications arise between fluent speakers of the same language, and more specifically using multimodal interactional studies to explore variation in language use relating to neurotype (e.g. autistic or neurotypical interlocutors).

Before beginning my PhD program, I was a high school math teacher for four years, and then joined Northwestern, first for my Master's in Computer Science, and then as a researcher in Rob Voigt's Linguistic Mechanisms Lab studying racial disparities in news coverage of gun violence.

Selected Research Projects

    Conversations within Neurotype
    Qualifying Paper (in progress)

  • Interactional sociolinguistic study on how late-diagnosed autists and non-autists engage in conversation with others of the same neurotype, and how that might vary based on interlocutor familiarity and interactional goal.

    • Quantifying Racial Disparities in Media Representations of Gun Violence at Scale (2026)
    Ruth Bagley, Susan Burtner, Andrew Papachristos, and Rob Voigt. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

  • Developed algorithm to match gun violence incident metadata with news articles with 98% precision
  • Identified differences in news coverage of incidents in neighborhoods where 60+% of the residents are white vs. people of color
  • Used computational methods including LLMs to quantify a variety of textual measures, from topic mentions to implicit framing

    • Social Construction of Urban Space: Using LLMs to Identify Neighborhood Boundaries From Craigslist Ads (2026)
    Adam Visokay, Ruth Bagley, Ian Kennedy, Chris Hess, Kyle Crowder, Rob Voigt, Denis Peskoff. Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (ACL)

  • Mapped Craiglist rental ads onto different definitions of Chicago neighborhood boundaries
  • Identified where the poster claimed the property was to identify centers of human-defined neighborhoods

Experience

    Education

  • M.S. Computer Science Northwestern University (2022)
  • B.A. Linguistics Haverford College (2017)

    • Employment

  • Senior Research Technologist Northwestern University (2022-2024)
  • High School Math Teacher Lincoln Community School (2019-2021)
  • High School Math Teacher Intern The Putney School (2018-2019)