Jessy Li

Jessy Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin, specializing in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). She actively engages in interdisciplinary research across discourse processing, language generation, and NLP applications in social and code-related contexts.

• Education:
  • Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania (2017)

Jessy’s research spans four core areas: Discourse Processing (analyzing discourse structure, pragmatics, and human/machine comprehension), Natural Language Generation (improving text generation through discourse models), Language and Society (exploring how self-perception and social context influence language use), and Language and Code (applying NLP to software evolution and documentation).

Her recent publications align with these themes, emphasizing discourse-level analysis, generation evaluation, and interdisciplinary applications of NLP in software engineering and sociolinguistics. She received recognition for an Outstanding Paper at EMNLP 2024.

She serves on the Graduate Studies Committee in the Department of Computer Science and leads AI initiatives at the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI). Her service roles include Senior Area Chair for ACL 2025, Action Editor for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), and co-organizing the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI).