Junyi Jessy Li

I am an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at The University of Texas at Austin. My research interests are in computational linguistics and natural language processing, especially computational discourse and pragmatics.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, advised by Prof. Ani Nenkova. I received my BSE in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and BE in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the UM-SJTU Joint Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Usually I go by Jessy.

Recent Service

• 2019: SIGDIAL board member (elected); Session Chair at AAAI; PC member of NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, IJCAI, CoNLL, SIGDIAL, *SEM, W-NUT, WiNLP, DSL; mentor at NAACL SRW
• 2018: Area Chair (Discourse and Pragmatics) of NAACL, PC member of ACL, EMNLP, COLING, AAAI, IJCAI, SIGDIAL, W-NUT, WiNLP, NLPCC, reviewer of the Computational Linguistics Journal, the Dialogue & Discourse Journal

Publications

• Evaluating Discourse in Structured Text Representations
  Elisa Ferracane, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li and Katrin Erk
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), short paper, to appear 2019

• A Framework for Writing Trigger-Action Todo Comments in Executable Format
  Pengyu Nie, Rishabh Rai, Junyi Jessy Li, Sarfraz Khurshid, Raymond Mooney and Milos Gligoric
  Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), to appear 2019 (ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award)

• Linguistically-Informed Specificity and Semantic Plausibility for Dialog Generation [bib] [code]
  Wei-Jen Ko, Greg Durrett and Junyi Jessy Li
  North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL), 2019

• Plain English Summarization of Contracts [bib] [data]
  Laura Manor and Junyi Jessy Li
  NAACL Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP), 2019

• From News to Medical: Cross-domain Discourse Segmentation [bib] [code and data]
  Elisa Ferracane, Titan Page, Junyi Jessy Li and Katrin Erk
  NAACL Workshop on Rhetorical Structure Theory and Related Formalisms (DISRPT), 2019

• Domain Agnostic Real-Valued Specificity Prediction [bib, code and data]
  Wei-Jen Ko, Greg Durrett and Junyi Jessy Li
  The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2019

• Predicting and Analyzing Language Specificity in Social Media Posts [bib, code and data]
  Yifan Gao, Yang Zhong, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Junyi Jessy Li
  The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2019

• Why Swear? Analyzing and Inferring the Intentions of Vulgar Expressions [bib] [data] [video by Isabel Cachola]
  Eric Holgate, Isabel Cachola, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Junyi Jessy Li
  Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2018

• Expressively vulgar: The socio-dynamics of vulgarity and its effects on sentiment analysis in social media [bib] [data/code]
  Isabel Cachola, Eric Holgate, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Junyi Jessy Li
  International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2018 (Area Chair Favorite)

• A Corpus with Multi-Level Annotations of Patients, Interventions and Outcomes to Support Language Processing for Medical Literature [bib] [webpage]
  Benjamin Nye, Junyi Jessy Li, Roma Patel, Yinfei Yang, Iain Marshall, Ani Nenkova and Byron Wallace
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2018

• Natural Language Processing and Program Analysis for Supporting Todo Comments as Software Evolves [bib]
  Pengyu Nie, Junyi Jessy Li, Sarfraz Khurshid, Raymond Mooney, and Milos Gligoric
  AAAI Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering (NL4SE), 2018

• Aggregating and Predicting Sequence Labels from Crowd Annotations [bib] [code] [data]
  An Thanh Nguyen, Byron Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li, Ani Nenkova, and Matthew Lease
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2017

• Autism Quotient Scores Modulate the Perception and Production of Text Specificity in Adult Females
  Junyi Jessy Li, Julia Parish-Morris, Leila Bateman and Ani Nenkova
  International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR), abstract, 2017

• From Discourse Structure to Text Specificity: Studies of Coherence Preferences
  Junyi Jessy Li
  Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2017

• The Role of Discourse Units in Near-Extractive Summarization [bib] [code] [data]
  Junyi Jessy Li, Kapil Thadani and Amanda Stent
  Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2016 (Best Paper Nominee)

• The Instantiation Discourse Relation: A Corpus Analysis of Its Properties and Improved Detection [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li and Ani Nenkova
  North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL), short paper, 2016

• Improving the Annotation of Sentence Specificity [bib] [data]
  Junyi Jessy Li, Bridget O’Daniel, Yi Wu, Wenli Zhao, Ani Nenkova
  International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2016

• Estimating Text Intelligibility via Information Packaging Analysis [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li, AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium at AAAI 2016

• Detecting Content-Heavy Sentences: A Cross-Language Case Study [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li and Ani Nenkova
  Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2015

• Fast and Accurate Prediction of Sentence Specificity [bib] [code]
  Junyi Jessy Li and Ani Nenkova
  The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2015

• Cross-lingual Discourse Relation Analysis: A corpus study and a semi-supervised classification system [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li, Marine Carpuat and Ani Nenkova
  International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2014

• Assessing the Discourse Factors that Influence the Quality of Machine Translation [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li, Marine Carpuat and Ani Nenkova
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), short paper, 2014

• Addressing Class Imbalance for Improved Recognition of Implicit Discourse Relations [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li and Ani Nenkova
  Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2014

• Reducing Sparsity Improves the Recognition of Implicit Discourse Relations [bib]
  Junyi Jessy Li and Ani Nenkova
  Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2014

Students

• PhD students:
  • Elisa Ferracane (dissertation co-supervised with Katrin Erk)
  • Wei-Jen Ko (co-advised with Greg Durrett)
  • Laura Manor
• Undergraduate students:
  • Benjamin Chen, Computer Science.
  • Shrey Desai, Computer Science, Lala Fay & Claude DeVan Watts Endowed Presidential Scholarship.
  • Yifan Gao, Maths.
  • Neha Srikanth, Computer Science.
• Alumni:
  • Isabel Cachola (Maths 2019, Dean’s Honored Graduate, Aspire Research Excellence Award, Undergraduate Research Fellowship → AI2 Young Investigator, JHU)
  • Yang Zhong (Maths 2019 → Ohio State)
  • Victor Mena (Linguistics 2018)

Teaching

• Spring 2019:
  • LIN 373: Machine Learning Toolbox for Text Analysis
  • LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics
• Previous:
  • Fall 2018:
    • LIN 313: Language and Computers
    • LIN 393S: Computational Discourse
    • LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics (instructor on record: Katrin Erk)
  • Spring 2018:
    • LIN 313: Language and Computers
    • LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics
  • Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014: CIS 430/530: Computational Linguistics (TA, University of Pennsylvania)
  • Spring 2011: CIS 120: Programming Languages and Techniques I (TA, University of Pennsylvania)
  • Spring 2009: VG 101: Introduction to Programming (TA, Shanghai Jiao Tong University)