Junyi 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: 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.
  • Selected recent work: EMNLP’24 Outstanding Paper, EMNLP’23, ACL Findings’23
• Natural Language Generation: How can we harness, improve, and evaluate text generation? We study document-grounded tasks like text simplification and summarization, and incorporate discourse models in generation.
  • Selected recent work: ACL’24 InfoLossQA, ACL’24 FactPICO, EMNLP’23
• 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.
  • Selected recent work: EMNLP Findings’24, COLM’24, EACL’23
• Language and Code: We develop methods rooted in NLP and LLMs to understand, generate, and evaluate software evolution and documentation.
  • Selected recent work: ICSE’25, FSE’23, ICSE’23

Activities and Service

• July 2025, keynote at The 19th Linguistic Annotation Workshop @ ACL.
• July 2025, keynote at special symposium on computation and pragmatics, Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL).
• June 2025, University of Gothenburg.
• April 2025, talk at the CosmicAI seminar series.
• April 2025, CS Colloquium, University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
• April 2025, talk at Northeastern University.
• March 2025, talk at the Language Technology Lab, Cambridge University.
• March 2025, talk at the Computer Science Seminar Series, the University of Birmingham.
• January 2025, panel at the LSA.

• …for a complete list of prior events, check out my CV

• NAACL Secretary, 2024-present
• Senior Area Chair at ACL 2025, NAACL 2025, IJCNLP-AACL 2025; Area Chair at COLM 2025.
• Action Editor of TACL and CL
• (Senior) Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review
• Co-organizer of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI)
• SIGDIAL Board Member, 2023-2025.
• Tutorial Co-chair at EMNLP 2024.