YANG JANET LIU

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I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MaiNLP research lab at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) at LMU Munich led by Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where I was advised by Amir Zeldes, Ph.D. and was a member of Corpling@GU and Computational Linguistics @ Georgetown (GUCL). I was also a student research affiliate of NERT, directed by Nathan Schneider, Ph.D.

research interests involve:

  • tackling variation in NLP (broadly construed)
  • discourse-level linguistic phenomena across genres using computational, statistical, and corpus-based methods
  • NLP applications involving discourse structure and understanding
  • cross-framework discourse understanding and unifying discourse resources (co-organizer of the DISRPT shared task)
  • creation of discourse resources spanning different genres to inform model development and facilitate targeted evaluation
  • multilingual annotation projects involving discourse-level phenomena

📧 yliu [@] cis [dot] lmu [dot] de

news

Sep 21, 2024 One paper accepted to EMNLP 2024 (main) 🌴 Hope to see y’all in Miami, Florida 🇺🇸
Sep 18, 2024 eRST has been accepted to The Computational Linguistics journal and will be presented at EMNLP 2024 🌊 See y’all in Miami 🌴
Sep 02, 2024 Moved to Munich 🇩🇪 and started my postdoc at MaiNLP at CIS, LMU Munich 🥨
May 17, 2024 Officially hooded and graduated!
Apr 30, 2024 Starting Fall 2025, I will begin as an Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining Pitt, I will be a postdoctoral researcher at the MaiNLP research lab at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) at LMU Munich led by Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank.
Apr 09, 2024 Awarded a Spring 2024 GSAS-GradGov Research Project Award at Georgetown University!
Feb 23, 2024 I passed my dissertation defense :laughing:
Dec 01, 2023 Invited talk (online) at Prof. Dr. Dirk Hovy’s MilaNLP Lab at Bocconi University 🇮🇹
Sep 25, 2023 Invited talk at Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank’s MaiNLP research lab at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) at LMU in Munich, Germany about The Pivotal Role of Genres: Insights from English RST Parsing and Abstractive Summarization 🕺🏻
Sep 20, 2023 Invited talk at Prof. Dr. Manfred Stede’s Applied CL Discourse Lab at Universität Potsdam about English RST Parsing in Potsdam, Germany 🇩🇪
Jul 11, 2023 One paper accepted to SIGDIAL 2023 🙌🏼 See you in Prague 🇨🇿 in September
Jun 23, 2023 Area Chair of Discourse and Pragmatics at EMNLP 2023 🇸🇬
May 30, 2023 Started a Research Scientist internship at Spotify USA Inc. 🤠🕺🏻🎸🎧🥁
May 17, 2023 One paper accepted to INTERSPEECH 2023 in Dublin, Ireland 🇮🇪
May 02, 2023 One paper accepted to the Findings of ACL 2023 See y’all in Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦
Apr 22, 2023 Invited talk at MASC-SLL 2023 at Georgetown Mason University (Arlington campus) 🤠
Jan 21, 2023 One paper accepted to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023) 🕺🏻 See y’all in Dubrovnik, Croatia 🇭🇷
Jan 11, 2023 Co-organizing the DISRPT2023 Shared Task on Discourse Segmentation, Connective and Relation Identification across Formalisms in conjunction with ACL2023 and the CODI2023 Workshop 🤠 More languages and discourse treebanks available 🙌🏼
Dec 14, 2022 Awarded a Fall 2023 GSAS Conference Travel Grant!
Dec 14, 2022 Awarded a Fall 2022 GSAS Conference Travel Grant and a Fall 2022 GSAS-GradGov Research Project Award!
Sep 21, 2022 One co-authored paper accepted at the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP) 👏🏼
May 09, 2022 One paper on Adpositional Pragmatic Markers accepted at the 16th Lingusitic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) Workshop, co-located with LREC 2022 in Marseille, France 🇫🇷
Nov 05, 2021 Passed my dissertation proposal defense ✌🏼
Jun 07, 2021 Started the Research Scientist, PhD - Summer Internship with the Lab in Language Technologies at Spotify Research 🎸🎧🥁
May 11, 2021 Passed the 2nd Qualifying Review ✌🏼
Feb 18, 2021 Co-organizing the DISRPT2021 Shared Task on Discourse Segmentation, Connective and Relation Identification across Formalisms in conjunction with EMNLP2021 and the CODI2021 Workshop 🤠
Dec 16, 2020 Done with PhD Coursework ✌🏼
Jul 01, 2020 A journal paper on detecting signals of discourse relations by Amir and I now published in Dialogue & Discourse 🕵🏻‍♀️
May 18, 2020 Started my first internship at Alexa AI @ Amazon as a Language Data Researcher Intern (VIRTUAL) 🔍
May 17, 2019 Happy Graduation 🎓 M.S. in Computational Linguistics, Georgetown University 🎉
Apr 15, 2019 Awarded a Spring 2019 GSAS Conference Travel Grant and a Spring 2019 GSAS-GradGov Research Project Award!

selected publications

  1. EMNLP
    GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains
    Yang Janet Liu*, Tatsuya Aoyama* , Wesley Scivetti* , Yilun Zhu* , and 5 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing , Nov 2024
    (*equal contribution)
  2. SIGDIAL
    What’s Hard in RST Parsing? Predictive Models for Error Analysis
    Yang Janet Liu, Tatsuya Aoyama , and Amir Zeldes
    In Proceedings of the 24th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue , Sep 2023
  3. ACL
    GUMSum: Multi-Genre Data and Evaluation for English Abstractive Summarization
    Yang Janet Liu, and Amir Zeldes
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 , Jul 2023
  4. EACL
    Why Can’t Discourse Parsing Generalize? A Thorough Investigation of the Impact of Data Diversity
    Yang Janet Liu, and Amir Zeldes
    In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics , May 2023