J. 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.

Note to prospective graduate students: If you are passionate about computational discourse and/or interdisciplinary applications of NLP, you’re welcome to drop me a note, and to apply to the Linguistics Department’s PhD program.

Recent Service

2019: PC member of AAAI, NAACL
2018: Area Chair (Discourse and Pragmatics) of NAACL, PC member of ACL, EMNLP, COLING, AAAI, IJCAI-ECAI, SIGDIAL, W-NUT, WiNLP, NLPCC, reviewer of the Computational Linguistics Journal, the Dialogue & Discourse Journal

Publications

Domain Agnostic Real-Valued Specificity Prediction
Wei-Jen Ko, Greg Durrett and Junyi Jessy Li
The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), to appear, 2019
Predicting and Analyzing Language Specificity in Social Media Posts
Yifan Gao, Yang Zhong, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Junyi Jessy Li
The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), to appear, 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, short paper (NAACL), 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, short paper (ACL), 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

Resources

[EMNLP’18] Annotations of pragmatic functions of vulgar words in tweets
[COLING’18] Sentiment annotation and prediction of vulgar tweets
[ACL’18] EBM-NLP: a corpus of richly annotated PICO elements of medical article abstracts.
[ACL’17] Noisy sequence label aggregator and medical article abstracts with annotated participants (from crowd workers and professionals).
[SIGDIAL’16] Code and data for near-extractive New York Times summaries.
[LREC’16] Data for sentence specificity ratings and underspecified expressions within sentences.
[AAAI’15] Speciteller, a fast and accurate predictor for sentence specificity.

Teaching

Fall 2018:
Previous:
- 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)