News
Grants, papers, talks, and milestones from the OUNLP Lab.
2026
- 05/2026 — Awarded an ICAST seed grant ($20K).
- 05/2026 — New preprint: “HydroAgent: Closing the Gap Between Frontier LLMs and Human Experts in Hydrologic Model Calibration via Simulator-Grounded RL”.
- 05/2026 — Two collaborative projects funded by NSF ART: InTRO Scoping Translational Research ($15K each).
- 05/2026 — Congratulations to the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) awardees Brendan Richards, Cuong Huynh, and Santiago Leon!
- 05/2026 — Congratulations to the Honors Research Apprenticeship Program (HRAP) awardees Nicholas Immenschuh and Addison Lin!
- 05/2026 — Thanks to Modal for their kind computing-credits support.
- 05/2026 — Our proposal was awarded by the Association of Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) 2026 Small Grants ($15,000) for studies of AI–client simulations.
- 04/2026 — Our paper “LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Attacks on Cooperative Spectrum Sensing” is accepted to ICCCN 2026.
- 04/2026 — Our multimodal LLM for materials science, MatterChat, is accepted to Nature Machine Intelligence!
- 02/2026 — Congratulations to Cuong and Masiko for receiving UROP fellowships for Spring 2026!
- 01/2026 — Our paper “Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese” is accepted to EACL 2026 (Main Conference).
2025
- 11/2025 — Thanks to Thinking Machines for the Tinker Teaching Grant!
- 11/2025 — Invited talk “Decoding Classroom Dialogue: Discourse Analysis in STEM Education” at Rice University’s Ken Kennedy Institute AI Seminar Series.
- 11/2025 — New preprint “Translation via Annotation…” available on arXiv.
- 10/2025 — New preprint “Rethinking On-policy Optimization for Query Augmentation” on arXiv: the first systematic comparison of prompting- vs. RL-based query augmentation, plus a hybrid method (OPQE) that outperforms both.
- 10/2025 — Participated in the NSF LEVEL-UP AI Round Table and contributed to the CRA report on Developing Strategies to Increase Capacity in AI Education.
- 10/2025 — Congratulations to Cuong Huynh! His undergraduate summer research on text simplification is accepted to the TSAR 2025 Workshop @ EMNLP.
- 09/2025 — Our collaborative proposal on seismic simulation was awarded by Nvidia (4 Max-Q GPUs).
- 09/2025 — Our proposal on small language models was awarded NSF ACCESS GPU credits.
- 08/2025 — Our paper using a state space model for reservoir release is accepted in the Journal of Hydrology.
- 08/2025 — One paper on frame semantics and LLMs is accepted to EMNLP 2025 (Main Conference)!
- 08/2025 — Congratulations to Tiffany and Ava for receiving the Undergraduate Engineering Research Fellowship for Fall 2025!
- 07/2025 — Our paper “AQUAH: Automatic Quantification and Unified Agent in Hydrology” is accepted to the ICCV 2025 Workshop on Sustainability with Earth Observation and AI.
- 05/2025 — Congratulations to Masiko Mamba on the Undergraduate Engineering Research Fellowship for Summer 2025.
- 04/2025 — Our paper on multi-perspective discourse analysis of teaching and tutoring dialogue is accepted to EDM 2025.
- 04/2025 — Awarded an Alternative Textbook Grant for course content on recent advances in LLMs and agentic AI.
- 03/2025 — Invited talk “Advances in Open LLMs” at the Gallogly College of Engineering Graduate Student Community (video).
- 02/2025 — New preprint on a multimodal LLM for materials science, MatterChat.
2024
- 11/2024 — Our paper “Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom Teaching Discourse” is accepted to COLING 2025.
- 11/2024 — Our paper on visualization for network pruning is accepted to TVCG.
- 10/2024 — Invited talk “Modularized Conversational Modeling” at the OU DISC.
- 09/2024 — Talk with students on the “History of NLP” at the OU AI/ML Club.
- 07/2024 — Our paper on dialogue classification via LLM fine-tuning is accepted to L@S 2024.
- 02/2024 — Invited talk “Modularized Conversational Modeling” at Emory University and Georgia State University.