About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department @ Rice University. I am also affiliated with the Ken Kennedy Institute. My research interests lie in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Interpretable Machine Learning, with a focus on the interpretability and analysis of neural language models. Prior to joining Rice, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Language and Speech Processing @ Johns Hopkins University, working with Mark Dredze. I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, where my advisor was Yangfeng Ji.

Highlights

🎓 Received the Outstanding Doctoral Student Award, UVA, 2023

🎉 Received the John A. Stankovic Graduate Research Award, UVA, 2023

🎉 I was awarded the Carlos and Esther Farrar Fellowship, 2022 - 2023

👩‍🏫 Received the UVA CS Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and University-wide Graduate Teaching Awards Nominee (top 5% of graduate instructors) for the course, CS 6501/4501 Interpretable Machine Learning, I co-designed and instructed at UVA in Spring 2022

📝 I maintain a Reading List with interesting papers

Updates

[07/2024] Invited to serve as a Senior Area Chair for ACL 2025
[06/2024] Tutorial on Explanation in the Era of Large Language Models @ NAACL 2024
[06/2024] Invited to serve as an Area Chair for EMNLP 2024
[04/2024] New preprint, Will the Real Linda Please Stand up...to Large Language Models? Examining the Representativeness Heuristic in LLMs, arXiv
[03/2024] Invited talk at How Sustainable is Artificial Intelligence?
[02/2024] New preprint, Benchmarking Large Language Models on Answering and Explaining Challenging Medical Questions, arXiv
[02/2024] New preprint, RORA: Robust Free-Text Rationale Evaluation, arXiv
[01/2024] Co-teach the course Trustworthy and Responsible NLP with Sharon Levy, Spring 2024, JHU
[12/2023] Co-host the 22nd MLNLP Seminar
[11/2023] Guest lecture on Interpretable and Explainable NLP at 601.467/667 Introduction to Human Language Technology @ JHU
[11/2023] Guest lecture on Interpretable and Explainable NLP at CSCI 699 Ethics in NLP @ USC
[10/2023] I will co-organize the BlackboxNLP 2024 Workshop at EMNLP 2024
[10/2023] Our tutorial Explanation in the Era of Large Language Models is accepted to appear at NAACL 2024
[09/2023] New preprint, Explainability for Large Language Models: A Survey, arXiv
[05/2023] REV: Information-Theoretic Evaluation of Free-Text Rationales is accepted by ACL 2023
[03/2023] Invited Talk on Bridging the Trustworthy Gap between AI and Humans: Interpretation Techniques for Modern NLP at the CLSP Seminar @ Johns Hopkins University
[12/2022] Presentation on Information-Theoretic Evaluation of Free-Text Rationales with Conditional V-Information at Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning (TSRML) Workshop @ NeurIPS
[11/2022] Presentation on Explaining Predictive Uncertainty by Looking Back at Model Explanations at WiML Workshop 2022 @ NeurIPS
[10/2022] Talk on REV: Information-Theoretic Evaluation of Free-Text Rationales @ Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
[05/2022] Paper presentation on Pathologies of Pre-trained Language Models in Few-shot Fine-tuning at Insights Workshop @ ACL 2022
[02/2022] Paper presentation on Adversarial Training for Improving Model Robustness? Look at Both Prediction and Interpretation @ AAAI 2022
[12/2021] Invited talk on Improving Model Robustness via Interpretation-based Adversarial Training @ MLNLP
[12/2021] Presentation on Adversarial Training for Improving Model Robustness? Look at Both Prediction and Interpretation at WiML Workshop 2021 @ NeurIPS
[12/2021] Presentation on Adversarial Training for Improving Model Robustness? Look at Both Prediction and Interpretation @ 2021 Fall UVA CS Research Symposium
[06/2021] Paper presentation on Explaining Neural Network Predictions on Sentence Pairs via Learning Word-Group Masks @ NAACL 2021
[04/2021] 2021 CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women Workshop
[03/2021] Poster presentation @ ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC)
[11/2020] Paper presentation on Learning Variational Word Masks to Improve the Interpretability of Neural Text Classifiers @ EMNLP 2020
[08/2020] Presentation on Learning Variational Masks for Explainable Next Utterance Prediction in Dialog Systems at IBM Research
[07/2020] Paper presentation on Generating Hierarchical Explanations on Text Classification via Feature Interaction Detection @ ACL 2020
[12/2019] Poster presentation on Improving the Explainability of Neural Sentiment Classifiers via Data Augmentation @ NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Robust AI in Financial Services
[10/2019] Poster presentation on Building Hierarchical Interpretations in Natural Language via Feature Interaction Detection @ UVA CS Research Symposium Fall 2019
[04/2019] Invited talk on How to Train a More Interpretable Neural Text Classifier, AIML-Seminar @ UVA

Research Experience

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, June 2023 - June 2024
Center for Language and Speech Processing

Postdoctoral Fellow
Advisor: Mark Dredze
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Aug. 2018 - May 2023
Information and Language Processing Lab
- Research Assistant
- Advisor: Yangfeng Ji
Allen Institute for AI (AI2), Seattle, WA, May 2022 - Oct. 2022
Mosaic Group
- Research Intern
- Manager: Yejin Choi
- Mentors: Swabha Swayamdipta, Faeze Brahman, Xiang Ren
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, May 2021 - Aug. 2021
Language and Information Technologies Group
- Research Intern
- Manager: Ahmed H. Awadallah
- Mentors: Guoqing Zheng, Srinagesh Sharma
IBM Research, New York, NY, Jun. 2020 - Aug. 2020
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
- Research Intern
- Manager: Luis Lastras
- Mentors: Chulaka Gunasekara, Song Feng, Hui Wan, Jatin Ganhotra, Sachindra Joshi

Professional Service

Organizer: BlackboxNLP Workshop @ EMNLP 2024
Senior Area Chair: ACL 2025
Area Chair: EMNLP 2024, ACL ARR, WiML Workshop @ NeurIPS 2022
Program Committee: ACL 2023, AAAI 2023, EMNLP 2021 - 2023, NAACL 2021, EACL 2023, CoNLL 2021 - 2022, NLPCC 2022, ACL DialDoc Workshop 2022, EMNLP BlackboxNLP Workshop 2021, 2023, NeurIPS Explainable AI Approaches for Debugging and Diagnosis Workshop 2021, Document-grounded Dialogue Workshop 2021, MASC-SLL 2020
Reviewer: TACL 2023 - 2025, ICLR 2024, COLM 2024, NeurIPS 2023, EMNLP 2023, ACL ARR 2021 - now, ACL 2020 - 2021, EMNLP BlackboxNLP Workshop 2022, CoNLL 2019 - 2020, NLPCC 2019 - 2021
Diversity Representative for UVA Computer Science Graduate Student Group (CSGSG) Council, 2022

Tutorial

Explanation in the Era of Large Language Models @ NAACL 2024

Last update: 07/2024