Papers by Kevin Wu
SlugNERDS: A Named Entity Recognition Tool for Open Domain Dialogue Systems (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | UCSC researchers have developed an open domain social bot aimed at casual conversation . NER and NEL are important preprocessing steps for understanding user intent in open domain dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool for NER and NEL in open domain dialogue that addresses these challenges . they also propose two corpora based on 10,000 real user conversations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed open domain social bot is aimed at casual conversation. |
Reasoning or Knowledge: Stratified Evaluation of Biomedical LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Medical reasoning in large language models is a complex cognitive process through which clinicians interpret patient data and make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that disentangles knowledge recall from reasoning by training a PubMedBERT-based classifier and applying it to 11 widely used biomedical QA benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework disentangles knowledge recall from reasoning by training a PubMedBERT-based classifier and applying it to 11 widely used biomedical QA benchmarks. |
Sequence Models for Computational Etymology of Borrowings (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a computational model of word borrowing can be useful for lexicon expansion and language preservation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use neural sequence models to model word borrowings from a donor word to an incorporated word. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model beats baseline models in both directions, with the quantity of data strongly influencing performance. |
Predicting Language Models’ Success at Zero-Shot Probabilistic Prediction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kevin Ren, Santiago Cortes-Gomez, Carlos Miguel Patiño, Ananya Joshi, Ruiqi Lyu, Jingjing Tang, Alistair Turcan, Khurram Yamin, Steven Wu, Bryan Wilder
| Challenge: | Recent work has investigated the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as zero-shot models for generating individual-level characteristics. |
| Approach: | They conduct a large-scale empirical study of large language models’ zero-shot predictive capabilities across a wide range of tabular prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The results show that LLMs perform well on the base prediction task, and when they perform well, they are more likely to provide high-quality predictions. |
Implicit Discourse Relation Identification for Open-domain Dialogues (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Discourse relation identification is a challenging problem in open-domain dialogue systems . previous work relies on formal text but this data is not suitable for informal dialogue . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically extract the implicit discourse relation argument pairs from dialogic turns and a pipeline to identify them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline extracts argument pairs from dialogic turns and improves it by performing feature ablation and incorporating dialogue features. |
DF-RAG: Query-Aware Diversity for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a common technique for grounding language models in domain-specific information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new retrieval technique that incorporates diversity into the retrieval step to improve performance on reasoning-intensive QA benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on reasoning-intensive QA benchmarks by 4–10%. |