About

 

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Univeristy of Texas at Dallas. My research interests are in natural language processing, specifically in the areas of summarization and computational narrative.

I received my PhD from Columbia University in 2019, advised by Professor Kathleen McKeown. My dissertation was about adapting automatic summarization to new sources of information; here is a talk I gave at Johns Hopkins about my dissertation work.

My CV is here.

Prospective/Incoming Students: If you are interested in working with me, I do not accept research students until after they have taken a course with me. The courses I teach are listed below.

Publications

 

Haoming Li and Jessica Ouyang. GRASP: Graph-Reasoning Aided Survey Planning for High-Fidelity Related Work Generation. To appear in Findings of ACL 2026.

Xiangci Li and Jessica Ouyang. How Does Knowledge Selection Help Retrieval Augmented Generation? Findings of EMNLP 2025.pdf

Josh Wiedemeier, Elliot Tarbet, Max Zheng, Sangsoo Ko, Jessica Ouyang, Sang Kil Cha, and Kangkook Jee. PYLINGUAL: Toward Perfect Decompilation of Evolving High-Level Languages. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025. pdf

Xiangci Li, Sihao Chen, Rajvi Kapadia, Jessica Ouyang, and Fan Zhang. Minimal Evidence Group Identification for Claim Verification. TrustNLP 2025. pdf

Xiangci Li and Jessica Ouyang. Explaining Relationships Among Research Papers. COLING 2025. pdf

Xiancgi Li and Jessica Ouyang. Related work generation: A survey. EMNLP 2024. pdf

Xiangci Li, Yi-Hui Lee, and Jessica Ouyang. Cited text spans for scientific citation text generation. SDP 2024. pdf

Ariella Lenton-Brym, Alexis Collins, Jeanine Lane, Carlos Busso, Jessica Ouyang, Skye Fitzpatrick, Janice Kuo, and Candice Monson. Using machine learning to increase access to and engagement with trauma-focused interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder. In the British Journal of Clinical Psychology. pdf

Xiangci Li, Linfeng Song, Lifeng Jin, Haitao Mi, Jessica Ouyang and Dong Yu. A knowledge plug-and-play test bed for open-domain dialogue generation. LREC-COLING 2024. pdf

Biswadip Mandal, Xiangci Li, and Jessica Ouyang. Contextualizing generated citation texts. LREC-COLING 2024. pdf

Gerardo Ocampo Diaz and Jessica Ouyang. Measuring cross-text cohesion for segmentation similarity scoring. LREC-COLING 2024. pdf

Gerardo Ocampo Diaz and Jessica Ouyang. An alignment-based approach to text segmentation similarity scoring. CONLL 2022. pdf

Xiangci Li, Biswadip Mandal, and Jessica Ouyang. CORWA: A citation-oriented related work annotation dataset. NAACL 2022. pdf

Pooneh Mousavi and Jessica Ouyang. Detecting hashtag hijacking for hashtag activism. In NLP4PI 2021. pdf

Sarah Grzebinski, Helen Cheung, Charles Sanky, Jessica Ouyang, and Stephen Krieger. Educational research: Why medical students choose neurology. In Neurology, Issue 97. pdf

Soumya Sourav and Jessica Ouyang. Lightweight models for multimodal sequential data. In WASSA 2021. Best Paper Award. pdf

Jessica Ouyang and Kathleen McKeown. Neural network alignment for sentential paraphrases. In Proceedings of ACL 2019. pdf

Jessica Ouyang, Boya Song, and Kathleen McKeown. A robust abstractive system for cross-lingual summarization. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019. pdf

Jessica Ouyang, Serina Chang, and Kathleen McKeown. Crowd-sourced iterative annotation for narrative summarization corpora. In Proceedings of EACL 2017. pdf

Jessica Ouyang and Kathleen McKeown. Modeling reportable events as turning points in narrative. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2015. Notable Dataset Award. pdf

Jessica Ouyang and Kathleen McKeown. Towards automatic detection of narrative structure. In Proceedings of LREC 2014. pdf

Teaching

 
Spring 2026

CS 6320 Natural Language Processing

Past Courses
Fall 2024, Spring 2025: CS 2305 Discrete Mathematics for Computing
Spring 2024: CS 3305 Discrete Mathematics for Computing II
Spring 2021--2023: CS 2305 Discrete Mathematics for Computing I
Fall 2019--2023: CS 6320 Natural Language Processing
Spring 2020: CS 7301 Advanced Natural Language Processing
Fall 2016, Spring 2017: COMS W3203 Discrete Mathematics (Columbia University)

Advising

 

PhD students: Xiangci Li (2024, now at Amazon); Haoming Li, Hamid Rouhani, Zhiyu Yang

MS students: Manas Bundele (2020); Biswadip Mandal, Dat Quoc Ngo (2022); Tanmay Vakare (2023)