Lucy Lu Wang

Allen Library 199D

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98105

Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington

Adjunct, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

Adjunct, Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education

Adjunct, Human Centered Design & Engineering

Research Scientist, Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)

Hello and welcome! I am an NLP and health informatics researcher, studying how to design and build language technologies to improve access to and understanding of information, especially in high-expertise domains like science and healthcare. My work has resulted in techniques and tools to improve access to scholarly content, synthesize scientific evidence, and support people to make better decisions about their health.

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School, where I lead the Language Accessibility Research (LARCH) lab. You can find a list of our publications here.

Curriculum vitae: PDF

news

12/20	Our paper “Explainable AI for Clinical Outcome Prediction: A Survey of Clinician Perceptions and Preferences” led by Jun Hou, has been accepted to AMIA Informatics Summit!
11/05	I received a Google Academic Research Award for “AI-Driven Accessibility Solutions for STEM Educational Materials: Bridging Accessibility Gaps for Blind and Visually Impaired Students”!
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.
08/31	Very excited to have been awarded an NIH R01 led by PIs Lynn Worobey and Heather Feldner! We will have an opportunity over the next five years to study experiences of ableism for people with mobility disabilities and impacts on their health outcomes using mixed methods approaches.

select recent publications

Explainable AI for Clinical Outcome Prediction: A Survey of Clinician Perceptions and Preferences

Jun Hou, and Lucy Lu Wang

AMIA Informatics Summit Mar 2025

PDF Bib

@article{hou2025xaisurvey,
  title = {Explainable AI for Clinical Outcome Prediction: A Survey of Clinician Perceptions and Preferences},
  author = {Hou, Jun and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2025},
  month = mar,
  journal = {AMIA Informatics Summit},
}

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},
}

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},
}

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},
}

funding

My work is generously supported by the following grants and gifts:

Google Academic Research Award for "AI-Driven Accessibility Solutions for STEM Educational Materials: Bridging Accessibility Gaps for Blind and Visually Impaired Students." PI. $75,000. 2024-10-01.
National Institutes of Health (RFA-HD-24-007) for "R01: Determining the relationships between provider bias, experiences of ableism, and health outcomes for people with mobility disabilities." Co-I. Collaborative Proposal with Heather Feldner and Lynn Worobey. Total: $1.8M, iSchool portion: $413k. 2024-09-01 through 2029-08-31 (expected).
Microsoft AI and the New Future of Work gift for "Accelerating Research Translation into Design Practice Using Generative AI." Co-PI. Collaborative Proposal with Gary Hsieh. $50,000. 2024-07-01.
UW eScience Azure Cloud Credits for Research and Teaching for "Improving STEM Document Accessibility for Blind and Low Vision Readers Through Human-AI Collaboration." PI. $10,000 Azure cloud credits. 2023-10-01 through 2024-11-30.
Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Program for "Using generative AI to accelerate the translation of research insights into design practice." Co-PI. Collaborative Proposal with Gary Hsieh. $20,000 Azure OpenAI credits. 2023-09-01 through 2024-08-31.
UW Center for an Informed Public Innovation Fund for "Designing for credibility: improving the use of generative AI for science communication." Co-PI. Collaborative Proposal with Gary Hsieh. $24,950. 2023-09-01 through 2024-08-31.
UW Institute of Medical Data Science Pilot Award for "Using machine learning to optimize prediction of extubation failure and clinical action." MPI. Collaborative Proposal with Mark Wurfel and Neha Sathe. $40,000 and $10,000 AWS cloud credits. 2023-07-01 through 2024-12-31.
UW iSchool Strategic Research Fund for "AI-assisted clinical trial risk of bias assessment." PI. $18,118. 2023-01-01 through 2024-12-31.
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) gift for "Synthesizing evidence for personalized biomedical information seeking." PI. $100,000. 2022-09-01.