I am an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at The University of Texas at Austin where I work on computational linguistics and natural language processing. More specifically, my research focuses on discourse processing, language generation, and NLP in social contexts. I belong to the Computational Linguistics Group at UT Linguistics, and the UT NLP Group. I obtained my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, advised by Ani Nenkova. Usually, I go by Jessy.
Some of the topics that I am currently researching include:
- Discourse Processing: What does it take for a text to be coherent and for us to fully comprehend what was discussed? We investigate discourse-level devices at play, e.g., discourse (coherence) structure, questions under discussion, and pragmatics.
- Natural Language Generation: We work towards building text generation models that will help a broad audience with better access to information: text simplification, summarization, question generation, and incorporating discourse models in generation.
- Language and Society: We seek to understand how people use language in social media to express their emotions, and how major events impact language use in both conventional media and social media.
- Language and Code: Together with researchers in UT’s CS and ECE departments, we model natural language (e.g., comments, method names) as well as programming languages in software repositories.
Activities and Service
- NAACL Secretary, 2024-2025
- March 2024, talk at Texas A&M University Data Science Seminar Series
- Best Area Chair Award at EMNLP 2023
- November 2023, talk at Columbia University, seminar on language generation and summarization
- November 2023, talk at South by Semantics Workshop
- November 2023, talk at St. David’s CHPR Colloquium Series
- October 2023, panel on simplification and LLMs at HARC
- October 2023, talk at UT Dallas
- July 2023, *SEM invited talk: Modeling Discourse as Questions and Answers
- May 2023 Colloquium at Northwestern Lingusitics
- ACL 2022 Outstanding Paper: Evaluating Factuality in Text Simplification
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NSF CAREER Award, 2022
- Tutorial Co-chair at EMNLP 2024.
- Senior Area Chair of Discourse and Pragmatics at ACL 2024, NAACL 2024, EACL 2024; Resources and Evaluation at NAACL 2024.
- Senior Area Chair of Natural Language Generation, Summarization and Simplification, LREC-COLING 2024.
- Area Chair of AAAI 2024.
- SIGDIAL Board Member, 2023-2025.
- (Senior) Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review
- Associated editor for the Dialogue and Discourse journal
- Standing reviewer of TACL, CL
- Co-organizer of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI)