About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department @ Rice University. I am also affiliated with the Ken Kennedy Institute. I am broadly interested in Natural Language Processing, Interpretable Machine Learning, and Trustworthy AI. My research focuses on explaining and evaluating the properties, mechanisms, and capabilities of (multimodal) large language models; characterizing and controlling their prediction behavior; and enabling their collaboration with humans and integration into real-world applications such as medicine, healthcare, sports, and more. By developing explainable AI techniques, I aim to make intelligent systems controllable by system developers, accessible to general users, applicable to various domains, and beneficial to society.

Prior to joining Rice, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Language and Speech Processing @ Johns Hopkins University from 2023 to 2024, hosted by Dr. Mark Dredze. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2023 at the University of Virginia, where my advisor was Dr. 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

[05/2025] One paper accepted to ACL 2025 Findings 🎉
[05/2025] Lecture on Natural Language Processing at the K2I AI and Machine Learning Boot Camp
[05/2025] One paper accepted to ICML 2025 🎉
[04/2025] Invited talk, Explainable AI in the Era of Large Language Models, at the 2025 SIOP Annual Conference
[02/2025] Invited talk, Explanation Generation and Evaluation for (Multimodal) Large Language Models, Ethical and Explainable GeoAI Workshop @ Texas A&M University
[02/2025] Panel Discussion on Large Language Models, DeepSeek, and the Future of Generative AI @ Rice
[01/2025] One paper accepted to ICLR 2025, three papers accepted to NAACL 2025 🎉
[12/2024] Invited talk, From Passion to Profession: My Journey as a Woman in STEM, Girls Who Code Club @ Bellaire High School, Houston
[11/2024] Organize the BlackboxNLP Workshop @ EMNLP 2024
[11/2024] Invited talk, Incredible Yet Limited Large Language Models in the Wild, CS @ FSU
[10/2024] New preprint, Language Models are Symbolic Learners in Arithmetic, arXiv
[10/2024] New preprint, MiCEval: Unveiling Multimodal Chain of Thought’s Quality via Image Description and Reasoning Steps, arXiv
[10/2024] New preprint, From Babbling to Fluency: Evaluating the Evolution of Language Models in Terms of Human Language Acquisition, arXiv
[10/2024] New preprint, SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models, arXiv
[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

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 - 2025, The First Workshop on the Application of LLM Explainability to Reasoning and Planning @ COLM 2025
Senior Area Chair: ACL 2025
Area Chair: NAACL 2025, COLING 2025, EMNLP 2024, ACL ARR 2024 - now, 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 - 2025, COLM 2024 - 2025, NeurIPS 2023 - 2025, EMNLP 2023, ACL ARR 2021 - now, ACL 2020 - 2021, EMNLP BlackboxNLP Workshop 2022, CoNLL 2019 - 2020, NLPCC 2019 - 2021
Mentor for the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program @ Rice, 2025
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: 05/2025