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

05/12	Our paper “What About My Design Content? Exploring the Use of Generative AI to Support Customization of Translational Research Artifacts” (led by Donghoon Shin) has been accepted to DIS!
05/08	New preprint led by Katelyn Mei: “Passing the Buck to AI: How Individuals’ Decision-Making Patterns Affect Reliance on AI”
02/06	New paper acceptances! “Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models” (led by Bingbing Wen has been accepted to TACL and “Varying Shades of Wrong: Aligning LLMs with Wrong Answers Only” (led by Jihan Yao) has been accepted to ICLR!
12/20	Our paper “Explainable AI for Clinical Outcome Prediction: A Survey of Clinician Perceptions and Preferences” led by lab alum 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”!

select recent publications

What About My Design Context? Exploring the Use of Generative AI to Support Customization of Translational Research Artifacts

Donghoon Shin, Tze-Yu Chen, Gary Hsieh, and Lucy Lu Wang

DIS Jul 2025

Website PDF Bib

@article{shin2025customizedDC,
  title = {What About My Design Context? Exploring the Use of Generative AI to Support Customization of Translational Research Artifacts},
  author = {Shin, Donghoon and Chen, Tze-Yu and Hsieh, Gary and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2025},
  month = jul,
  journal = {DIS},
}

Passing the Buck to AI: How Individuals’ Decision-Making Patterns Affect Reliance on AI

Katelyn Xiaoying Mei, Rock Yuren Pang, Alex Lyford, Lucy Lu Wang, and Katharina Reinecke

Jul 2025

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{mei2025passing,
  title = {Passing the Buck to AI: How Individuals' Decision-Making Patterns Affect Reliance on AI},
  author = {Mei, Katelyn Xiaoying and Pang, Rock Yuren and Lyford, Alex and Wang, Lucy Lu and Reinecke, Katharina},
  year = {2025},
}

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

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) Jul 2025

arXiv PDF Bib

@article{wen2025know,
  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 = {2025},
  journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)},
}

Varying Shades of Wrong: Aligning LLMs with Wrong Answers Only

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

ICLR Apr 2025

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 = {2025},
  month = apr,
  journal = {ICLR},
}

APPLS: Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Plain Language Summarization

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

EMNLP Nov 2024

arXiv ACL 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,
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.519},
}

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 HTML 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},
  doi = {10.1145/3663548.3675634},
}