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

• 2020: SIGDIAL board member (2019-2021); Senior PC member of AAAI
• 2019: Session Chair at AAAI; PC member of NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, IJCAI, CoNLL, SIGDIAL, *SEM, W-NUT, WiNLP, DSL; mentor at NAACL SRW

Publications

• Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Political Document Analysis
  Shrey Desai, Barea Sinno, Alex Rosenfeld and Junyi Jessy Li
  Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), to appear 2019

• A Framework for Writing Trigger-Action Todo Comments in Executable Format [bib]
  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)

• 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:
  • LIN 313: Language and Computers
  • LIN 393: Computational Linguistics with Minimal Supervision
  • LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics (instructor on record: Katrin Erk)
• Previous:
  • Spring 2019:
    • LIN 373: Machine Learning Toolbox for Text Analysis
    • LIN 389C: Research in Computational Linguistics
  • 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)