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.

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

• November 2023, Invited Talk at South by Semantics Workshop
• October 2023, Invited 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

• NSF CAREER Award, 2022

• Senior Area Chair of Discourse and Pragmatics 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.
• Area Chair of Discourse and Pragmatics at EMNLP 2023, ACL 2023 and *SEM 2023; Area Chair of Resources and Evaluation at AACL 2023.
• (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)
• Program co-chair of SIGDIAL 2022.