Junyi Jessy Li

I am an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at The University of Texas at Austin. My research interests are in Natural Language Processing with a focus on computational discourse, in particular, techniques to characterize discourse structure and its impact on text understanding.

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 got 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. I was born in Shanghai, and here’s my name in Chinese: 李珺懿. Usually I go by Jessy.

Note to prospective students: I am looking to recruit graduate students who 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

• 2018: Area Chair (Discourse and Pragmatics) for NAACL, PC member for ACL, EMNLP, COLING, AAAI, IJCAI-ECAI, SIGDIAL, W-NUT, WiNLP, NLPCC, reviewer for the Computational Linguistics Journal
• 2017: PC member for EMNLP, ACL, ACL-SRW, EACL, EACL-SRW, W-NUT, NewSum, reviewer for the Dialogue and Discourse Journal

Publications

• Expressively vulgar: The socio-dynamics of vulgarity and its effects on sentiment analysis in social media
  Isabel Cachola, Eric Holgate, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Junyi Jessy Li
  International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), to appear, 2018

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

• [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

• Current
  • Spring 2018: LIN 313: Language and Computers
  • Spring 2018: LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics
• Previous
  • 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)