Jessica Lin

Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University · jcalin [at] ntu [dot] edu [dot] tw

My name is Jessica (Yi-Ju) Lin (林宜儒). I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. Before joining NTU, I worked as a Linguist at Google, where I contributed to Factuality dataset creation for model training and evaluation. I completed my PhD in Computational Linguistics at Georgetown University, where I was advised by Amir Zeldes and was a member of Corpling Lab and Computational Linguistics @ Georgetown (GUCL). Before coming to Georgetown, I recieved my M.A. in Linguistics from National Taiwan University and B.A. in Applied Chinese Language and Culture from National Taiwan Normal University. Check out my CV here.

Research Interests

My research develops computational and corpus-based approaches to discourse-level language understanding across genres. I am especially interested in how important information is introduced, maintained, and interpreted in longer texts, including questions such as which entities become central in a document, how readers and models identify them, and how their salience shapes prediction and summarization. I use these questions to study and evaluate large language models on discourse-level phenomena such as entity salience, summarization, hallucination, and discourse relations. More broadly, my work contributes to corpus linguistics through the creation and analysis of genre-diverse NLP datasets, and I am interested in extending these methods to literary texts and Digital Humanities.


Publications

Expect the Unexpected? Testing the Surprisal of Salient Entities

Jessica Lin, Amir Zeldes

In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026).San Diego, CA, USA. 30618–30629.

2026

What Makes an Entity Salient in Discourse?

Amir Zeldes, Jessica Lin

To appear in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

2026

GUM-SAGE: A Novel Dataset and Approach for Graded Entity Salience Prediction

Jessica Lin , Amir Zeldes

In Proceedings of the Findings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025). Vienna, Austria, 438–455. paper arXiv code

2025

GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains

Yang Janet Liu, Tatsuya Aoyama, Wesley S Scivetti, Yilun Zhu, Shabnam Behzad, Lauren Elizabeth Levine, Jessica Lin, Devika Tiwari, Amir Zeldes

In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024). Miami, Florida, USA, 12287–12303.

2024

GUMsley: Evaluating Entity Salience in Summarization for 12 English Genres

Jessica Lin, Amir Zeldes

In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2024). St. Julian’s, Malta, 2575–2588.

2024

GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation

Tatsuya Aoyama, Shabnam Behzad, Luke Gessler, Lauren Levine, Jessica Lin, Yang Janet Liu, Siyao Peng, Yilun Zhu, Amir Zeldes

In Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) at ACL 2023. Toronto, Canada, 166-178.

2023

Leveraging World Knowledge in Implicit Hate Speech Detection

Jessica Lin

In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI) at EMNLP 2022. Abu Dhabi, UAE, 31-39.

2022

WikiGUM: Exhaustive Entity Linking for Wikification in 12 Genres

Jessica Lin, Amir Zeldes

In Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop (LAW-DMR) at EMNLP 2021. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, 170-175.

2021

The Secret to Popular Chinese Web Novels: A Corpus-Driven Study

Yi-Ju Lin, Shu-Kai Hsieh

In Proceedings of 2nd Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019), Leipzig, Germany.

2019

Education

Georgetown University

Ph.D.
Computational Linguistics
August 2020 - August 2025

Georgetown University

M.S.
Linguistics - Computational Linguistics Track

GPA: 3.89/4.0

August 2020 - December 2023

National Taiwan University

M.A.
Linguistics - Computational Linguistics Track

GPA: 3.73/4.0

September 2017 - June 2020

National Taiwan Normal University

B.A.
Department of Applied Chinese Language and Culture

GPA: 3.86/4.0

September 2013 - June 2017

Experience

Student Assistant

Conference planning, including designing the conference website and helping with administrative tasks
March 2023

Corpus Resources Coordinator

Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University
- Developed and maintained corpus resources for NLP research by running software and data maintenance projects, improving overall data quality and enabling more accurate analysis

- Interfaced with users and handled acquisition requests

August 2021 - December 2021

Program Assistant

Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC)
Built website for the Study Abroad Language Corpus (SALC) using Django
CODE
January 2021 - May 2021

Research Assistant in LOPE (Lab of Ontologies, Language Processing and E-Humanities)

Chinese Wordnet (CWN) Project
Published in Proceedings of the 10th Global WordNet Conference (GWC 2019)
PDF
2019

Student Assistant

2018 Team Taiwan Cultivation Project for International Linguistics Olympiad
Group activity organizer in Taiwan national team summer camp
July 2018

Teaching

Introduction to NLP

Teaching Assistant
Grading and holding office hours with enrolled students to discuss any issues with the course content and exams
Designed and led exam review sessions as the primary instructor
Fall 2023, Spring 2025

Introduction to Linguistics

Teaching Assistant
Grading and holding office hours with enrolled students to discuss any issues with the course content, final project and exams
Spring 2021

Online Chinese Teaching Course

Student Drill Instructor

Online elementary Chinese teaching course of Austin Peay State University (Tennessee State)(30 hours in total)

March 2016 - May 2016

Awards


Grants


Service


Skills

Language Skills
Programming Languages & Tools
Projects