Lillian Lee

Lillian Lee is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, affiliated with the College of Computing and Information Science. Her research bridges natural language processing (NLP) and social interaction, focusing on how computational methods can analyze and facilitate socially embedded processes. She co-developed the course “Natural Language Processing and Social Interaction” and leads the Cornell NLP Group. Her work spans sentiment analysis, computational social science, and multimodal interaction, with notable contributions to understanding language features in persuasion, online debate dynamics, and humor comprehension.

Key research interests include analyzing digital traces of social interaction, evaluating AI systems through human-centered criteria, and exploring the interplay between language structure and societal influence. Recent projects examine pivotal moments in mental health counseling, cross-cultural historical narratives on Wikipedia, and the role of wording in message propagation.

• Awards: ACM Fellow, ACL Distinguished Service Award (2021), Test of Time Award, Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Labs/Teams: Member of the Cornell Natural Language Processing Group
• Advising: Mentored numerous students whose work has driven impactful projects in NLP and computational social science