Papers by Ivory Yang
Recontextualizing Revitalization: A Mixed Media Approach to Reviving the Nüshu Language (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Nüshu is an endangered language from Jiangyong County, Hunan, China, and the world’s only known writing system created and used exclusively by women. |
| Approach: | They propose to use NüshuStrokes to record all 397 Unicode Nü Shu characters in sequential handwriting by an expert calligrapher. |
| Outcome: | Evaluating five state-of-the-art Chinese Optical Character Recognition systems on NüshuVision lowers CER to 0.67, a modest but meaningful improvement over previous datasets. |
KinyaProp: Fine-Grained Propaganda Annotation in Kinyarwanda (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Propaganda is a widely used approach for shaping public opinion and disseminating misinformation in news media. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained propaganda dataset for Kinyarwanda . they find that current LLMs are not reliable annotators in low resource settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that current LLMs perform poorly in low resource settings . the dataset shows they perform poorly on discourse-level techniques . |
Enhancing LLM-Based Persuasion Simulations with Cultural and Speaker-Specific Information (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Qichao Wang, Ivory Yang, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to persuasive dialogue generation suffer from stance oscillation and low informativeness. |
| Approach: | They propose reinforced instructional prompting, a method that ensures speaker characteristics consistently guide all stages of dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ensures speaker characteristics guide all stages of dialogue generation and aligns language use with speakers’ native languages to better capture cultural nuances. |
What is it? Towards a Generalizable Native American Language Identification System (2025.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Despite their cultural and historical significance, Native American languages remain unsupported by major commercial language identification systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to curate linguistic resources across all Native American languages for robust training and tailor data augmentation to generate synthetic yet linguistically coherent training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system would be generalizable across all Native American languages . it would also generate coherent training samples for low-resource languages based on Plains Apache . |
NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Nüshu is a rare syllabic script used by Yao women in china for self-expression . a lack of data makes the reconstruction labor-intensive and costly . |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-driven framework to train large corpora on endangered languages . Nüshu is a rare syllabic script used by Yao women in china for self-expression . |
| Outcome: | NüshuRescue automates evaluation and expands target corpora to accelerate linguistic revitalization. |
Is It Navajo? Accurate Language Detection for Endangered Athabaskan Languages (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Endangered languages are significantly underrepresented in contemporary language technologies, exacerbating the challenges of their preservation and revitalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a random forest classifier trained on Navajo and 20 erroneously suggested languages by Google's Language Identification tool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifier achieves near-perfect accuracy across other Athabaskan languages suggesting its potential for broader application. |
MentalManip: A Dataset For Fine-grained Analysis of Mental Manipulation in Conversations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on mental manipulation focus on context-free content and face challenges in identifying implicit toxicity. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that analyzes mental manipulation and its components . they propose to use 4,000 fictional dialogues to identify the techniques utilized for manipulation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset enables a comprehensive analysis of mental manipulation . it shows that leading-edge models inadequately identify and categorize manipulative content . |
Visibility as Survival: Generalizing NLP for Native Alaskan Language Identification (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Indigenous languages are largely invisible in commercial language identification systems, a stark reality exemplified by Google Translate’s LangID tool, which excludes all 150 Indigenous languages of North America. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shows how large language models and specialized classifiers can effectively identify these languages with minimal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that large language models and specialized classifiers can effectively identify these languages with minimal data. |
Communication Makes Perfect: Persuasion Dataset Construction via Multi-LLM Communication (2025.naacl-long)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Ivory Yang, Shiyu Ji, Joice Chen, Farnoosh Hashemi, Shubham Mohole, Ethan Gearey, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in generating persuasive dialogue, yet concerns about the fluency and sophistication of their outputs persist. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM communication framework that facilitates the efficient production of high-quality, diverse linguistic content with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels in naturalness, linguistic diversity, and the strategic use of persuasion, even in complex scenarios involving social taboos. |