I am an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at The University of Texas at Austin where I work on computational linguistics and natural language processing. More specifically, my research focuses on discourse processing, language generation, and NLP in social contexts. 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.

Some of the topics that I am currently researching include:

Discourse Processing: What does it take for a text to be coherent and for us to fully comprehend what was discussed? We investigate discourse-level devices at play, e.g., discourse (coherence) structure, questions under discussion, and pragmatics.

Natural Language Generation: We work towards building text generation models that will help a broad audience with better access to information: text simplification, summarization, question generation, and incorporating discourse models in generation.

Language and Society: We seek to understand how people use language in social media to express their emotions, and how major events impact language use in both conventional media and social media.

Language and Code: Together with researchers in UT’s CS and ECE departments, we model natural language (e.g., comments, method names) as well as programming languages in software repositories.