Lucy Li

YouTube video by Michael Saxon (NLP & Generative AI research) Conferencemaxxing: How to grow your profile and network as a scientist

And here is the presentation I gave on networking, self-promo, and how to make the most out of a conference. Hope this helps for everyone at NeurIPS!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9hG...

Trying an experiment in good old-fashioned blogging about papers: dallascard.github.io/granular-mat...

For undergraduates curious about complex systems research, applications are now open for the 2026 Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) program — a fully funded, 10-week summer research experience at the Santa Fe Institute.

Apply by Jan. 14, 2026: santafe.edu/ucr

Interested in detecting influence operations on TikTok? Check this out👇 just accepted at ICWSM 2026 @icwsm.bsky.social 🚀🚀🚀

An image of the best paper slide at the EMNLP2025 conference, with the audience in the background

🎉 Congratulations to all #EMNLP2025 award winners 🎉

Starting with the ✨Best Paper award ✨:

"Infini-gram mini: Exact n-gram Search at the Internet Scale with FM-Index"
by Hao Xu, Jiacheng Liu, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi
aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...

1/n

A staircase in the new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences building at Wisconsin Madison. Tan wood structures surround tapestry art and a small indoor garden.

A view from above of the staircases in the Wisconsin CDIS building

An shot from below of winding wooden staircases and a glass atrium rooftop. The new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences building at Wisconsin Madison.

A bicolor white cat with seal-colored markings, looking upwards with big wide dark eyes.

It's the season for PhD apps!! 🥧 🦃 ☃️ ❄️

Apply to Wisconsin CS to research
- Societal impact of AI
- NLP ←→ CSS and cultural analytics
- Computational sociolinguistics
- Human-AI interaction
- Culturally competent and inclusive NLP
with me!

lucy3.github.io/prospective-...

COLM is going to San Francisco for 2026!

🗓️Dates: October 6-9, 2026
🏨Venue: Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Website and CFPs for papers and workshops coming up soon!

An image of a conference presentation slide showing that EMNLP 2026 will be held October 24-29th in Budapest, with an audience below

🌉 #EMNLP2026 will be October 24-29th in Budapest! 🌉

Thanks all for a great conference, and see you at the next one!

I'm leading a session with PhD students on developing elevator pitches for research. Does anyone have suggested readings, websites, or just general advice on the topic?

No one ever taught me how to do this and honestly I struggle with this skill. All suggestions welcome!

A white llama in a cafe setting, peering over the counter at the barista bartender.

Not to brag too much or anything but after emnlp I got brunch with a llama in Shanghai

More apps! Dianping for restaurants / food lists (though the reviews are kinda skewed since restaurants might incentivize patrons to leave good reviews), Apple Maps or baidu maps for navigation, little red note for food and activity recs

If you don't already live in China and you're going to EMNLP, download WeChat / Alipay if you want to buy anything in the city and setup an eSIM on your phone before you leave your home country

Cornell (NYC and Ithaca) is recruiting AI postdocs, apply by Nov 20, 2025! If you're interested in working with me on technical approaches to responsible AI (e.g., personalization, fairness), please email me.

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971

Data Sciences Speaker Series - DSI The Data Sciences Speaker Series is a collaboration of data science programs at U of T. Seminars are held on the third Monday of each month.

Ok y'all I'm throwing out a hot take on LLMs in Toronto in January:

"We’re Talking About the Wrong Error: Why Variance Matters More than Bias in AI"

Enough of the bias talk. LLMs are a completely different beast and our old frameworks are no longer useful.

datasciences.utoronto.ca/dsi-home/dat...

u might be wondering why is lucy reading linguistics papers in our llm-ified world well just u wait once i am done flailing around as a researcher u will maybe MAYBE see what i am working on

tfw I have a problem but then I find some nice linguistics paper from pre-2000s that not only addresses the problem but also provides a very nice articulation of the problem

Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

❗REMINDER: The I School is hiring❗We are looking for an Assistant Professor of Information who can address key questions about metadata, information systems, and more. #AcademicSky

The final review date is Nov. 1. We look forward to reading your applications! https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

We're excited to host a virtual workshop where graduate students can present work-in-progress that engages with data from the Post45 Data Collective in some way.

Editors from the P45DC, Public Books, Post45, and the 19th Century DC will be there to offer feedback.

Proposals are due December 1!

A diagram illustrating pointwise scoring with a large language model (LLM). At the top is a text box containing instructions: 'You will see the text of a political advertisement about a candidate. Rate it on a scale ranging from 1 to 9, where 1 indicates a positive view of the candidate and 9 indicates a negative view of the candidate.' Below this is a green text box containing an example ad text: 'Joe Biden is going to eat your grandchildren for dinner.' An arrow points down from this text to an illustration of a computer with 'LLM' displayed on its monitor. Finally, an arrow points from the computer down to the number '9' in large teal text, representing the LLM's scoring output. This diagram demonstrates how an LLM directly assigns a numerical score to text based on given criteria

LLMs are often used for text annotation, especially in social science. In some cases, this involves placing text items on a scale: eg, 1 for liberal and 9 for conservative

There are a few ways to accomplish this task. Which work best? Our new EMNLP paper has some answers🧵
arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00828

Aaaaarrrggh

AI is already at work in American newsrooms.

We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea.

Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism:

a screenshot of code that says "from turtle import pd" "import torch" "from transformers import..."

Strangest autocomplete-induced error: I had imported 🐢 and not 🐼

2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society

Sorry to have to leave AIES early. I have to be back in Atlanta to run the Georgia Tech Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society rcais.github.io

A circular flow diagram that compares current and proposed practices for LLM development using data from adopters and non-adopters. Three gray boxes represent current practices: “R&D,” “Chat Models,” and “Adopters’ Needs and Usage Data,” connected in a clockwise loop with black arrows. A blue box labeled “Non-adopters’ Needs and Usage Data” adds a proposed feedback path, shown with blue arrows, linking non-adopter data back to R&D and adopters’ data.

As of June 2025, 66% of Americans have never used ChatGPT.

Our new position paper, Attention to Non-Adopters, explores why this matters: AI research is being shaped around adopters—leaving non-adopters’ needs, and key LLM research opportunities, behind.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.15951

Every Language Model Has a Forgery-Resistant Signature The ubiquity of closed-weight language models with public-facing APIs has generated interest in forensic methods, both for extracting hidden model details (e.g., parameters) and for identifying...

We discovered that language models leave a natural "signature" on their API outputs that's extremely hard to fake. Here's how it works 🔍

📄 arxiv.org/abs/2510.14086 1/

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

haha it's funny that you remember the ice cream/pizza rate! The "no" exchange market is 📈📉📈

pink frosted pop tarts with rainbow sprinkles

i ran out 😆 but we can exchange some virtual ones

COLM 2025: 9 cool papers and some thoughts Reflections on the 2025 COLM conference, and a discussion of 9 cool COLM papers on benchmarking and eval, personas, and improving models for better long-context performance and consistency.

𝑵𝒆𝒘 𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒕! A rundown of some cool papers I got to chat about at #COLM2025 and some scattered thoughts

saxon.me/blog/2025/co...

I reward myself with a pop tart every time i say no to something
I also get a pop tart when I want a pop tart
I'm going through sooo many pop tarts