LTI Ph.D. Dissertations - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science

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The Ph.D. degree is the highest form of academic accomplishment. The Ph.D. dissertations below present some of the most advanced research being done at the time of their publication.

2026

Teaching AI to Listen in a Multilingual World: From Single to Multi-Sequence Speech Recognition

Graduate	Advisor(s)	Dissertation	Employer Upon Graduation
Syeda Akter	Nyberg	Bridging Pretraining and Post-Training: Toward Reasoning-Centric Large Language Models
Brendon Boldt	Mortensen	Principled Evaluation of Deep Learning-Based Emergent Communication
Luke Breitfeller	Rose	Time as Rhetoric: Relating Temporal Order and Directed Narrative Intent in the Clinical Text Domain
Jessica Huynh	Diaz/Bigham	Automatic Personalized Evaluation
Brian Yan	Watanabe	Teaching AI to Listen in a Multilingual World: From Single to Multi-Sequence Speech Recognition

2025

Graduate	Advisor(s)	Dissertation	Employer Upon Graduation
Hira Dhaymal	Raj/Singh	Computational Techniques for Voice Intelligence: Deducing Psychological Factors from Human Voice	Researcher, Apple
Patrick Fernandes	Neubig	Understanding, Explaining, and Aligning Neural Models for Machine Translation
Liangke Gui	Hauptmann	Toward Data-Efficient Multimodal Learning of World Scenes	GenMedia Researcher, Google DeepMind
Armineh Nourbakhsh	Rose	Towards Grounded Multimodal Enterprise Document Understanding	AI and Machine Translation Manager, Apple
Adithya Pratapa	Mitamura	Event Understanding in Multi-Document Corpora
Yijun Qian	Hauptmann	Towards Zero-Shot Human Action Understanding and Generation	Research Scientist, Meta
James Route	Nyberg	Multidocument Text Classification over Heterogeneous Data Sources
Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan	Rose	Intelligent Support for Collaborative Learning in Advanced Computer Science Courses — From Worked Examples to Data-Driven Insights	Senior Applied Scientist & Team Lead, Human & Machine, Amazon
Muhammad Shah	Raj	Towards Generalizable Robustness of Deep Learning Models	Applied Scientist II, Amazon AGI
Zhiqing Sun	Yang	Scalable Alignment of Large Language Models Towards Truth Seeking, Complex Reasoning, and Human Values	Research Scientist, Meta Superintelligence Lab
Haoyang Wen	Hauptmann	Knowledge-Enhanced Social Content Analysis in Generative Modeling	Applied Scientist, Amazon
Fangzheng Xu	Neubig	External Knowledge Augmented Language Models for Code Generation and Agents	Technical Staff, Microsoft AI
Ruohong Zhang	Yang	Enhancing Neural Network Performance through Model-Generated Training Signals	Technical Staff, xAI

2024

Graduate	Advisor(s)	Dissertation	Employer Upon Graduation
Vidhisha Balachandran	Tsvetkov	Designing Transparent and Factual Text Generation Systems Grounded in Language Structure	Senior Researcher, Microsoft
Xuakai Chang	Watanabe	Everyday Conversation Speech Recognition with End-to-End Neural Networks	Machine Learning Researcher, Apple
Ta-Chung Chi	Rudnicky	Toward Length-Extrapolatable Transformers	Research Scientist, Databricks Mosaic Research
Sang Choe	Xing	Understanding Training Data in Large-Scale Machine Learning	Technical Staff, Anthropic
Carla de Oliveria Viegas	Bigham	Methodology for Studying Emotional, Coversational, and Linguistic Facial Expressions
James Fiacco	Rosé	Functional Components as a Paradigm for Neural Model Explainability	Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Wizards of the Coast
Zhengbao Jiang	Neubig	Towards More Factual Large Language Models: Parametric and Non-parametric Approaches	Technical Staff, Microsoft AI
Kundan Krishna	Bigham/Lipton	Improving the reliability of language models for summarization	AI Safety Researcher, Microsoft AI
Zhengzhong Liu	Mitamura	Diving Deep into Event Semantics	Director, MBZUAI IFM Silicon Valley Lab
Aman Madaan	Yang	Enhancing Language Models with Structured Reasoning	AI Researcher & Engineer, xAI
Sanket Mehta	Strubell	Efficient Lifelong Learning in Deep Neural Networks: Optimizing Architecture, Training, and Data	Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind
Chan Young Park	Tsvetkov	Socioculturally Aware Language Technologies	Research Assistant, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
Ankit Shah	Raj/Singh	Computational Audition with Imprecise Labels	Associate Director, Accenture
Daniel Spokoyny	Berg-Kirkpatrick	Weak Supervision and Numerical Commonsense for Modeling Climate-related Text Documents	Postdoctoral Researcher, UC SanDiego
Nikita Srivatsan	Berg-Kirkpatrick	Leveraging Structure and Context for Language-Adjacent Representation Learning	Research Scientist, Scaled Cognition
Lijun Yu	Hauptmann	Towards Multi-Task Multi-Modal Models: A Video Generative Perspective	Researcher,, Google DeepMind
Shuyan Zhou	Neubig	Solving Real-World Tasks with AI Agents	Assistant Professor - CS, Duke
Hao Zhu	Neubig/Bisk	Artificial Social Intelligence Challenges, Environments, and Mechanisms	Post-Doctoral Scholar - Stanord
Xiaoyu Zhu	Hauptmann	Learning Generalizable Visual Representations Towards Novel Viewpoints, Scenes and Vocabularies	Machine Learning Researcher, Apple

2023

Graduate	Advisor(s)	Dissertation	Employer Upon Graduation
Chaitanya Ahuja	Morency	Communication Beyond Words: Grounding Visual Body Motion with Language	Researcher, Meta
Prakhar Gupta	Bigham	Improving Reliability in Dialogue Systems	Research Scientist, Google
Sachin Kumar	Tsvetkov	Optimization Methods For Modeling Diversity In Language Technologies	Post-Doc AI2, Asst Professor, Ohio State University
Juncheng Billy Li	Metze	Towards Robust Large-scale Audio/Visual Learning	Quantitative Researcher, Two Sigma Investment
Xinjian Li	Watanabe, Black	Low-Resource Speech Recognition for Thousands of Languages	Research Scientist, Google
Kaixin Ma	Nyberg	Hybrid Knowledge Architectures for Question Answering	NLP Researcher, Tencent AI Lab
Salvador Bedredín Medina Maza	Hauptmann	Talking us into the Metaverse: Towards Realistic Streaming Speech-to-Face Animation	Research Scientist, Epic Games
Sanket Vaibhav Mehta	Strubell	Efficient Lifelong Learning in Deep Neural Networks: Optimizing Architecture, Training, and Data	Research Scientist, Google
Chirag Nagpal	Dubrawski	Leveraging Heterogeneity in Time-to-Event Predictions	Research Scientist, Google
Raphaël Olivier	Raj	Assessing and enhancing adversarial robustness in context and applications to speech security
Naoki Otani	Hovy	Leveraging Eventuality-Centric Implicit Knowledge for Natural Language Understanding	Research Scientist, Megagon Labs
Hai Pham	Póczos, Woodruff	Towards Efficient and Scalable Representation Learning	Technical Staff, Reka AI
Torsten Wörtwein	Morency	Towards Improving Transparency in Multimodal Affect Perception	Multimodal AI/ML Engineer, ETS
Donghan Yu	Yang	Leveraging Textual Semantics for Knowledge Graph Acquisition and Application	Senior Researcher, Microsoft
Shikun Zhang	Sadeh	Understanding People’s Diverse Privacy Attitudes: Notification, Control, and Regulatory Implications	TikTok
Zhisong Zhang	Hovy, Strubell	Exploring Language Structured Prediction in Resource-limited Scenarios
Zhong Zhou	Waibel	Massively Multilingual Text Translation for Low-Resource Languages

2022

Graduate	Advisor(s)	Dissertation	Employer Upon Graduation
Khyathi Raghavi Chandu	Black	Effective Anchoring of Multiview Narrative Generation	Research Scientist, Meta AI
Aditi Swanand Chaudhary	Neubig	Automatic Extraction and Application of Language Descriptions for Under-Resourced Languages	Researcher, Google Research
Volkan Cirik	Morency, Berg-Kirkpatrick	Understanding Language Referring To The VisualWorld	Research Scientist, ASAPP
Siddharth Dalmia	Metze, Black	Exploiting Compositionality in Sequence Models	Research Scientist, Google
Anjalie Field	Tsvetkov	Integrating Language Technologies and Social Theories	Post-Doctoral Fellow - Stanford University
Jonathan Francis	Nyberg, Oh	Knowledge-enhanced Representation Learning for Multiview Context Understanding	Research Scientist, Bosch
Varun Gangal	Hovy	A Suite of Low-Data Generation Settings Necessitating Interventions on End-to-End NLG Models	Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Clemson University (SC)
Junxian He	Neubig, Berg-Kirkpatrick	Towards Efficient Natural Language Generation	Tenure Track Asst. Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Ting-Yao Hu	Hauptmann	Disentangled Representations beyond Vectors for Multimedia Content	Researcher, Apple Inc.
Divyansh Kaushik	Lipton, Hovy	Robustifying NLP with Humans in the Loop	Associate Director for Emerging Technologies & National Security Policy, Federation of American Scientists
Xiang Kong	Hovy	Towards Efficient Neural Machine Translation	Machine Learning Researcher, Apple
Shikib (Ahmad) Mehri	Eskenazi	Towards Generalization in Dialog through Inductive Biases	Applied Scientist II - Amazon (Sunnyvale)
Aakanksha Naik	Rosé	Adapting to the Long Tail in Language Understanding	Research Scientist, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Shruti Palaskar	Metze, Black	Multimodal Learning from Videos: Exploring Models and Task Complexities	Research Scientist, Apple
Hy Hieu Pham	Yang, Le	Reducing the Costs to Design, Train, and Collect Data for Neural Networks with Combinatorial Optimization
Dheeraj Rajagopal	Hovy	Explanations for Natural Language: From Theory to Practice	Researcher, Google (Seattle)
Sai Krishna Rallabandi	Black	De-Entanglement: A Framework towards building Ubiquitous speech technologies	Fidelity
Shruti Rijhwani	Neubig	Improving Optical Character Recognition for Endangered Languages	Research Scientist, Google
Maria Ryskina	Gormley, Hovy	Learning Computational Models of Non Standard Language	Post-Doctoral Associate, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
Evangelia Spiliopoulou	Hovy	Modeling Event Implications via Multi-faceted Entity Representations	Applied Scientist, AWS AI Amazon
Xinyi (Cindy) Wang	Neubig	Data Efficient Multilingual Natural Language Processing	Research Scientist, Google
Chunting Zhou	Neubig	Mitigating Semantic and Distributional Discrepancies in Natural Language Processing	Research Scientist, Meta AI

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