Lucy Lu Wang

Allen Library 199D

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98105

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School. I hold Adjunct appointments in Computer Science & Engineering, Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education, and Human Centered Design & Engineering. I am also a Visiting Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), affiliated with the Semantic Scholar Research Team.

I study how language technologies can help improve access and understanding of information, especially in high-expertise domains like science and healthcare. I achieve this by investigating AI/NLP techniques and tools to improve access to scholarly content, synthesize scientific evidence, and support people in making better health-related decisions.

Interested in joining our lab? Read this.

Curriculum vitae: PDF

news

10/16	New preprint: “Varying Shades of Wrong: Aligning LLMs with Wrong Answers Only” showing the benefits of preference alignment between wrong answers only.
10/03	Two 🌴EMNLP🌴 paper acceptances! “APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization” to the main conference and “Characterizing LLM Abstention Behavior in Science QA with Context Perturbations” to Findings.
08/15	New preprint! “Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models” Led by Bingbing Wen.
07/24	Our paper “Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last Decade” is accepted to ASSETS 2024! Led by Anukriti.
06/15	My invited essay “Generative AI for Scholarly Information Access” is now published in the June issue of Charleton Hub’s Against the Grain!

select recent publications

Varying Shades of Wrong: Aligning LLMs with Wrong Answers Only

Jihan Yao, Wenxuan Ding, Shangbin Feng, Lucy Lu Wang, and Yulia Tsvetkov

arXiv Oct 2024

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{yao2024wow,
  title = {Varying Shades of Wrong: Aligning LLMs with Wrong Answers Only},
  author = {Yao, Jihan and Ding, Wenxuan and Feng, Shangbin and Wang, Lucy Lu and Tsvetkov, Yulia},
  year = {2024},
  month = oct,
  journal = {arXiv},
}

APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization

Yue Guo, Tal August, Gondy Leroy, Trevor Cohen, and Lucy Lu Wang

EMNLP Nov 2024

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{guo2024appls,
  title = {APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization},
  author = {Guo, Yue and August, Tal and Leroy, Gondy and Cohen, Trevor and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  journal = {EMNLP},
  year = {2024},
  month = nov,
}

Characterizing LLM Abstention Behavior in Science QA with Context Perturbations

Bingbing Wen, Bill Howe, and Lucy Lu Wang

EMNLP Findings Nov 2024

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{wen2024characterizing,
  title = {Characterizing LLM Abstention Behavior in Science QA with Context Perturbations},
  author = {Wen, Bingbing and Howe, Bill and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2024},
  month = nov,
  journal = {EMNLP Findings},
}

Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last Decade

Anukriti Kumar, and Lucy Lu Wang

ASSETS Oct 2024

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{kumar2024uncovering,
  title = {Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last Decade},
  author = {Kumar, Anukriti and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2024},
  month = oct,
  journal = {ASSETS},
}

Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models

Bingbing Wen, Jihan Yao, Shangbin Feng, Chenjun Xu, Yulia Tsvetkov, Bill Howe, and Lucy Lu Wang

arXiv Jul 2024

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{wen2024art,
  title = {Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models},
  author = {Wen, Bingbing and Yao, Jihan and Feng, Shangbin and Xu, Chenjun and Tsvetkov, Yulia and Howe, Bill and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2024},
  month = jul,
  journal = {arXiv},
}

Generative AI for Scholarly Information Access

Lucy Lu Wang

Charleston Hub’s Against the Grain Jun 2024

HTML PDF Bib

@article{wang2024generative,
  title = {Generative AI for Scholarly Information Access},
  author = {Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2024},
  month = jun,
  journal = {Charleston Hub's Against the Grain},
  volume = {36},
  number = {3},
}