Jessy Li

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.

I am the AI Lead of the Explorable Universe Research Group in the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI). I am also a Graduate Studies Committee member in the Department of Computer Science.

Some of the topics that I am currently researching include:

Discourse Processing: What is coherence and how do humans and machines make sense of long texts? We investigate discourse-level devices at play, e.g., discourse structure, questions under discussion (discourse comprehension as question generation and question answering), and pragmatics.
Natural Language Generation: How can we harness, improve, and evaluate text generation paradigms to improve information access and integrity? We study document-grounded tasks like text simplification and summarization, and incorporate discourse models in generation.
Language and Society: We seek to understand how people use language to express their intentions and emotions, and how we perceive ourselves in connection to the world impacts our language use, often in subtle ways.
Language and Code: We develop methods rooted in NLP and LLMs to understand, generate, and test software code and documentation.

Activities and Service

March 2025, talk at Language Technology Lab, Cambridge University.
January 2025, panel at the LSA.
November 2024, EMNLP 2024 Outstanding Paper Award for our work on QUD & Discourse, Which questions should I answer? Salience Prediction of Inquisitive Questions
October 2024, talk at Workshop on Mind, Language and Ethics in AI, UT Austin.
October 2024, talk at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), the University of Trento; check out the slides on QUD and generation.
July 2024, talk at University of Marburg.
July 2024, talk at UM-SJTU Joint Institute.
May 2024, talk at Georgetown University.
March 2024, talk at Texas A&M University Data Science Seminar Series
…for a complete list of prior events, check out my CV
NAACL Secretary, 2024-present
Tutorial Co-chair at EMNLP 2024.
Senior Area Chair at ACL 2025, NAACL 2025, ACL 2024, NAACL 2024, EACL 2024, LREC-COLING 2024; Area Chair at AAAI 2024.
Action Editor of TACL
(Senior) Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review
Associated editor for the Dialogue and Discourse journal
Co-organizer of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI)
SIGDIAL Board Member, 2023-2025.