Hongli Zhan | 詹弘立

honglizhan@utexas.edu

Office: RLP 4.108

Arrogance is a sign of ignorance.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computational Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin, where I’m blessed to be advised by Professor Junyi Jessy Li. The ambition of my research is to build emotionally intelligent AI systems in a broader social context.

Casually, I go by Henry.

Education

UT Austin Logo
Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics (Minor in Computer Science), 2021 – Present
The University of Texas at Austin
⁃ Advisor: Professor Junyi Jessy Li
SJTU Logo
B.A. in English Linguistics (Second Major in Law), 2017 – 2021
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
⁃ Awards: Outstanding Undergraduate; Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award


Industry Experience

IBM Logo
Research Scientist Intern, IBM Research, Summer 2024
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
⁃ Hosted by the Responsible and Inclusive Technologies Research Group
⁃ Manager: Dr. Raya Horesh; Mentors: Dr. Muneeza Azmat & Dr. Mikhail Yurochkin
⁃ Received return internship offer for Summer 2025

Publications

* denotes equal contributions

  1. COLM 2024
    Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guided
    In Proceedings of the First Conference on Language Modeling. 2024. [28.8% acceptance rate (299 out of 1,036 submissions)]
  2. ACII 2024
    Large Language Models Produce Responses Perceived to be Empathic
    In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. 2024. [The acceptance rate was lower than 40%]
  3. EMNLP 2023Findings
    Evaluating Subjective Cognitive Appraisals of Emotions from Large Language Models
    Hongli ZhanDesmond C. Ong, and Junyi Jessy Li
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023. Dec 2023. [45.4% acceptance rate (1,758 out of 3,868 submissions)]
  4. ACL 2023Main
    Unsupervised Extractive Summarization of Emotion Triggers
    In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Jul 2023. [23.5% acceptance rate (910 out of 3,872 submissions)]
  5. EMNLP 2022Main
    Why Do You Feel This Way? Summarizing Triggers of Emotions in Social Media Posts
    In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Dec 2022. [22.1% acceptance rate (715 out of 3,242 submissions)]

News

Nov 5, 2024 I submitted my candidacy application and am officially a PhD candidate! At least one good thing came out this week…
Oct 3, 2024 :tada: My work during the summer internship at IBM Research has been rated by the Trustworthy AI Invention Development Teams (IDT) as a potential Search-2 patent! Now it’s officially patent-pending :)
Jul 10, 2024 :tada: 1 paper accepted to The First Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2024)!
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