{"683595":{"#nid":"683595","#data":{"type":"event","title":"Machine Learning Seminar Series Spring 2026 | Discourse Centric Models and Evaluation","body":[{"value":"\u003Cdiv\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EAbstract:\u003C\/strong\u003E Large Language Models are powerful models of language even for long stretches of generation. This has shifted the research frontier in natural language processing to where global coherence and consistency, strategic content planning and selection, and high-fidelity evaluation play increasingly important roles. These belong to discourse-level capabilities. I will first present a model of discourse in the framework of Questions Under Discussion (QUD), which provides the necessary data structure to move beyond a local view of text generation and informs us how to strategically decide which questions are worth answering in a given context. Next, I will share how this model can be used to measure and evaluate novelty, revealing the structural homogeneity in LLM outputs even when they differ in content. Finally, I will tackle the evaluation challenge for open-ended generation, focusing on fine-grained evaluation systems that capture implicit aspects absent from user specification. In all, this talk aims to address the need for discourse-level understanding and control in today\u2019s generative models.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EBio: \u003C\/strong\u003EJessy Li is an associate professor in the Linguistics Department and (by courtesy) the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in computational linguistics and natural language processing, specifically discourse and pragmatics, natural language generation, evaluation, and language \u0026amp; code. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, ACL and EMNLP Outstanding Paper Awards, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, among others. Jessy is an AI research lead at the NSF-Simons CosmicAI Institute, and an affiliated faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering \u0026amp; Sciences. She is the current Secretary of NAACL and a program chair of EMNLP 2026.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Ch3\u003EZoom Link: https:\/\/gatech.zoom.us\/j\/95262711498?pwd=OoN50EsqjRdi5zAJtgWiZH7BLFYwOg.1\u003C\/h3\u003E\u003Ch4\u003EMeeting ID: 952 6271 1498\u0026nbsp;\u003Cbr\u003EPasscode: 144273\u003C\/h4\u003E\u003Ch5\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/h5\u003E\u003Ch5\u003EFor CODA guest access, please contact shatcher8@gatech.edu at least 2 business days prior to the event.\u003C\/h5\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EAll Seminars Held on Wednesdays 12pm - 1pm\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Featuring | Jessy Li - Associate Professor Department of Lingustics \u0026 Department of Computer Science, UT Austin"}],"uid":"27863","created_gmt":"2025-08-06 17:18:01","changed_gmt":"2026-03-20 18:48:38","author":"Christa Ernst","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2026-04-08T12:00:00-04:00","event_time_end":"2026-04-08T13:00:00-04:00","event_time_end_last":"2026-04-08T13:00:00-04:00","gmt_time_start":"2026-04-08 16:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2026-04-08 17:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2026-04-08 17:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"location":"CODA Building 9th floor Atrium","extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"1278","name":"College of Sciences"},{"id":"545781","name":"Institute for Data Engineering and Science"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"9167","name":"machine learning"},{"id":"654","name":"College of Computing"},{"id":"187023","name":"go-data"},{"id":"193556","name":"large language models"},{"id":"192863","name":"go-ai"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1795","name":"Seminar\/Lecture\/Colloquium"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78761","name":"Faculty\/Staff"},{"id":"177814","name":"Postdoc"},{"id":"78771","name":"Public"},{"id":"174045","name":"Graduate students"},{"id":"78751","name":"Undergraduate students"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003Echrista.ernst@research.gatech.edu\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}