Jessy Li

I am an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department, and (by courtesy) the Computer Science Department, at The University of Texas at Austin where I work on computational linguistics and natural language processing. I belong to the Computational Linguistics Group at UT Linguistics and the UT NLP Group. I obtained my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, advised by Ani Nenkova. Usually, I go by Jessy.

I am the AI Lead of the Explorable Universe Research Group in the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI). I am also an affiliated faculty member of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

Some of the topics that I am currently researching include:

• Discourse Processing: How do humans and machines make sense of long texts? We investigate discourse-level devices at play, e.g., discourse structure, questions under discussion, and coherence.
  • Selected recent work: QUDSim, COLM’25; QSalience, EMNLP’24 Outstanding Paper; QUDeval, EMNLP’23; QUD parsing, ACL Findings’23
• Natural Language Generation: How can we harness, improve, and evaluate text generation? We study both creative generation and its evaluation, as well as document-grounded tasks in high-stake domains (like medicine) to make information more accessible.
  • Selected recent work: EvalAgent, COLM’25; InfoLossQA, ACL’24; FactPICO, ACL’24; ElabQUD, EMNLP’23
• Pragmatics and Alignment: We seek to understand pragmatics (how people use language to express their intentions) and emotions, in pursuit of better AI-human alignment.
  • Selected recent work: Strategic Discourse; SPRI, ICML’25; referring expressions and in/out group, EMNLP Findings’24; cognitive reappraisals, COLM’24
• Language and Code: We develop methods to understand, improve, and evaluate AI for software evolution, documentation, and coding in scientific research (with the CosmicAI institute).
  • Selected recent work: AstroVisBench, NeurIPS’25; exLong, ICSE’25; multilingual code evolution, FSE’23; TECO, ICSE’23

Note to prospective PhD students: I’m always looking for motivated students to join my group! If you’re looking to apply, you can apply to either the Linguistics PhD program (with computational linguistics as the subfield) and/or the Computer Science PhD program, depending on where your interests lie. Note that the application deadlines of the programs are different.

Activities and Service

• Program Chair, EMNLP 2026.
• NAACL Secretary, 2024-present
• Senior Area Chair at ACL 2025, NAACL 2025, IJCNLP-AACL 2025; Area Chair at COLM 2025, EACL 2026.
• Best Paper Committee member at IJCNLP-AACL 2025
• Action Editor of TACL and CL
• (Senior) Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review
• Co-organizer of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI)

• SIGDIAL Board Member, 2023-2025.

• October 2025, COLM 2025
• July 2025, keynote at The 19th Linguistic Annotation Workshop @ ACL.
• July 2025, keynote at the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL).
• June 2025, University of Gothenburg.
• April 2025, talk at the CosmicAI seminar series.
• April 2025, CS Colloquium, University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
• April 2025, talk at Northeastern University.
• March 2025, talk at the Language Technology Lab, Cambridge University.
• March 2025, talk at the Computer Science Seminar Series, the University of Birmingham.
• January 2025, panel at the LSA.
• …for a complete list of prior events, check out my CV