Computer Science · West Chester University

Richard Burns, Ph.D.

Professor in the Department of Computer Science at West Chester University. Research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning — teaching from CS1 through graduate data mining.

Jump to courses I teach ↓

Dissertation

Automated intention recognition of grouped bar charts in multimodal documents

Burns, Richard J. · University of Delaware, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2013

Selected publications

Context is key: aligning large language models with human moral judgments through retrieval-augmented generation

Matthew Boraske, Richard Burns · Proc. 38th FLAIRS, 2025. Full paper acceptance rate: 38%

Intergenerational classification of Reddit comments based on slang and emoji usage

James Dracup, Richard Burns · Proc. 40th PACISE, pp. 54–60, 2025

Best Graduate Student Paper

Statewise Twitter sentiment analysis of 2020 US presidential election using Apache Spark

Prathyusha Dongari, Richard Burns · Proc. 35th PACISE, pp. 44–51, 2021

Best Graduate Student Paper

An automated approach for the recognition of intended messages in grouped bar charts

Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer Schwartz · Computational Intelligence, 35:955–1002, 2019

Modeling a graph viewer's effort in recognizing messages conveyed by grouped bar charts

Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer Schwartz · Proc. 21st UMAP, pp. 114–126, 2013. Acceptance rate: 32%

Automatically recognizing intended messages in grouped bar charts

Richard Burns, Sandra Carberry, Stephanie Elzer, Daniel Chester · Proc. 7th Diagrams, pp. 8–22, 2012. Acceptance rate: 30%

Best Student Paper

Courses I Teach

Undergraduate

  • CSC 110Fundamentals of Computer Science
  • CSC 115Introduction to Computer Science
  • CSC 141Computer Science I
  • CSC 142Computer Science II
  • CSC 345Programming Languages and Paradigms
  • CSC 416Design and Construction of Compilers
  • CSC 476Game Development
  • CSC 481Artificial Intelligence
  • HON 122Computer Science for Social Justice

Graduate

  • CSC 540Programming Languages and Paradigms
  • CSC 565Design and Construction of Compilers
  • CSC 575Artificial Intelligence
  • CSC 576Data Mining
  • CSC 577Natural Language Processing

Independent studies and research

  • CSC 490, 499, 610Independent Study / Research