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

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”!
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.

select recent publications

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) 2025

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 = {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},
}

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 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},
}

Characterizing LLM Abstention Behavior in Science QA with Context Perturbations

Bingbing Wen, Bill Howe, and Lucy Lu Wang

EMNLP Findings Nov 2024

arXiv ACL 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},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.197},
}

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},
}