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 discourse and pragmatics, and NLP in social contexts.

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

2020: Organizer of the 1st Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse to be held at EMNLP; SIGDIAL board member (2019-2021); Senior PC member of AAAI and IJCAI; Area chair of Discourse and Pragmatics at ACL.
2019: Session Chair at AAAI; PC member of NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, IJCAI, CoNLL, SIGDIAL, *SEM, W-NUT, WiNLP; mentor at NAACL SRW

Publications

Associating Natural Language Comment and Source Code Entities
Sheena Panthaplackel, Milos Gligoric, Raymond Mooney and Junyi Jessy Li
The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), to appear 2020
Discourse Level Factors for Sentence Deletion in Text Simplification
Yang Zhong, Chao Jiang, Wei Xu and Junyi Jessy Li
The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), to appear 2020
Adaptive Ensembling: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Political Document Analysis [bib] [code and data]
Shrey Desai, Barea Sinno, Alex Rosenfeld and Junyi Jessy Li
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2019
Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification [bib]
Hsin-Ping Huang and Junyi Jessy Li
Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2019
A Framework for Writing Trigger-Action Todo Comments in Executable Format [bib] [code]
Pengyu Nie, Rishabh Rai, Junyi Jessy Li, Sarfraz Khurshid, Raymond Mooney and Milos Gligoric
Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2019 (ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award)
Evaluating Discourse in Structured Text Representations [bib] [code]
Elisa Ferracane, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li and Katrin Erk
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), short paper, 2019
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

Fall 2019:
Previous:
- Spring 2019:
  - LIN 373: Machine Learning Toolbox for Text Analysis
  - LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics
- Fall 2018:
- 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)