Yi-Chia Wang （王怡嘉）
Yi-Chia Wang

Yi-Chia Wang

Principal Research Scientist
Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII)
Carnegie Mellon University

Email  ·  LinkedIn  ·  Google Scholar

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the intersection of Computational Social Science, Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. The goal is to model human–human and human–computer interaction in social context, understand its outcomes (e.g., engagement, well-being, integrity/fairness), and develop language technologies to better support it.

Keywords:  natural language technologies · human-centered AI · language generation · large language models · human-computer interaction · conversational AI · user well-being · AI integrity · responsible AI · affective computing · sentiment analysis · social computing · data science · social media analysis · experimental design for user research

Education

  • Ph.D. in Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science
    Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
    • Advisor: Prof. Robert E. Kraut, HCII, CMU
    • Committee: Prof. William Cohen (MLD, CMU), Prof. Eduard Hovy (LTI, CMU), Dr. Moira Burke (Meta)
    • Thesis: Modeling Self-Disclosure in Social Networking Sites: Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Self-disclosure through Automatic Language Analysis
  • M.S. in Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science
    Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
  • B.S. in Computer and Information Science
    National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan

Publications

Refereed Conference Papers

  • 2025
    Kexun Zhang, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Zhaojiang Lin, Yuning Mao, and Yi-Chia Wang. Extrapolating to unknown opinions using LLMs. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2025.
  • 2024
    Suyu Ge, Chunting Zhou, Rui Hou, Madian Khabsa, Yi-Chia Wang, Qifan Wang, Jiawei Han, and Yuning Mao. MART: Improving LLM safety with multi-round automatic red-teaming. In Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2024.
  • 2024
    Yujia Gao, Wenna Qin, Aniruddha Murali, Christopher Eckart, Xuhui Zhou, Jacob D. Beel, Yi-Chia Wang, and Diyi Yang. A crisis of civility? Modeling incivility and its effects in political discourse online. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2024.
  • 2024
    Kristen M. Altenburger, Robert E. Kraut, Shirley A. Hayati, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Kaiyan Peng, and Yi-Chia Wang. Consequences of conflicts in online conversations. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2024.
  • 2023
    Caleb Ziems, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Halevy, and Diyi Yang. NormBank: A knowledge bank of situational social norms. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Long Paper), 2023.
  • 2023
    Tiezheng Yu, Hanchao Yu, Davis Liang, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Po-Yao Huang, Madian Khabsa, Pascale Fung, and Yi-Chia Wang. Generating hashtags for short-form videos with guided signals. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Long Paper), 2023.
  • 2023
    Tony Wang, Haard K. Shah, Raj Sanjay Shah, Yi-Chia Wang, Robert E. Kraut, and Diyi Yang. Metrics for peer counseling: Triangulating success outcomes for online therapy platforms. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023.
  • 2023
    Nan Wang, Qifan Wang, Yi-Chia Wang, Maziar Sanjabi, Jingzhou Liu, Hamed Firooz, Hongning Wang, and Shaoliang Nie. COFFEE: Counterfactual fairness for personalized text generation in explainable recommendation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
  • 2023
    Yi-Chia Wang, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Robert E. Kraut, and Alon Halevy. Using comments for predicting the affective response to social media posts. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2023.
  • 2022
    Caleb Ziems, Jane Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Halevy, and Diyi Yang. The moral integrity corpus: A benchmark for ethical dialogue systems. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Long Paper), 2022.
  • 2022
    Shen Yan, Kristen M. Altenburger, Yi-Chia Wang, and Justin Cheng. What does perception bias on social networks tell us about friend count satisfaction? In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (TheWebConf), 2022.
  • 2022
    Sharon Levy, Robert E. Kraut, Jane A. Yu, Kristen M. Altenburger, and Yi-Chia Wang. Understanding conflicts in online conversations. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (TheWebConf), 2022.
  • 2022
    Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Lijing Qin, Cristian Canton-Ferrer, and Alon Halevy. Affective signals in a social media recommender system. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2022.
  • 2020
    Lei Shu, Alexandros Papangelis, Yi-Chia Wang, Gökhan Tür, Hu Xu, Zhaleh Feizollahi, Bing Liu, and Piero Molino. Controllable text generation with focused variation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2020.
  • 2019
    Alexandros Papangelis, Yi-Chia Wang, Piero Molino, and Gokhan Tur. Collaborative multi-agent dialogue model training via reinforcement learning. In 20th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2019.
  • 2018
    Piero Molino, Huaixiu Zheng, and Yi-Chia Wang. COTA: Improving the speed and accuracy of customer support through ranking and deep networks. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2018.
  • 2016
    Yi-Chia Wang, Hayley Hinsberger, and Robert E. Kraut. Does saying this make me look good? How posters and outsiders evaluate Facebook updates. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2016.
  • 2016
    Yi-Chia Wang, Moira Burke, and Robert Kraut. Modeling self-disclosure in social networking sites. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW), 2016.
  • 2014
    Tatiana A. Vlahovic, Yi-Chia Wang, Robert E. Kraut, and John M. Levine. Support matching and satisfaction in an online breast cancer support community. In Proceedings of the 2014 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2014. CHI Honorable Mention Award
  • 2013
    Yi-Chia Wang, Moira Burke, and Robert E. Kraut. Gender, topic, and audience response: An analysis of user-generated content on Facebook. In Proceedings of the 2013 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2013.
  • 2012
    Yi-Chia Wang, Robert Kraut, and John M. Levine. To stay or leave? The relationship of emotional and informational support to commitment in online health support groups. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2012. CSCW Best Paper Award
  • 2012
    Yi-Chia Wang and Robert Kraut. Twitter and the development of an audience: Those who stay on topic thrive! In Proceedings of the 2012 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2012.
  • 2011
    Haiyi Zhu, Robert E. Kraut, Yi-Chia Wang, and Aniket Kittur. Identifying shared leadership in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2011 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2011.
  • 2010
    Yi-Chia Wang and Carolyn P. Rosé. Making conversational structure explicit: Identification of initiation-response pairs within online discussions. In Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2010.
  • 2010
    Hua Ai, Marietta Sionti, Yi-Chia Wang, and Carolyn Rose. Finding transactive contributions in whole group classroom discussions. In Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), 2010.
  • 2008
    Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, and William Cohen. Recovering implicit thread structure in newsgroup style conversations. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2008.
  • 2008
    Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, and Carolyn Penstein Rosé. Investigating the effect of discussion forum interface affordances on patterns of conversational interactions. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2008.
  • 2008
    Moonyoung Kang, Sourish Chaudhuri, Rohit Kumar, Yi-Chia Wang, Eric R. Rosé, Carolyn P. Rosé, and Yue Cui. Supporting the guide on the side. In Intelligent Tutoring Systems: 9th International Conference (ITS), 2008.
  • 2008
    Mahesh Joshi, Yi-Chia Wang, John Wilkerson, and Carolyn Rosé. A needs analysis for instructional support in legsim. In Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), 2008.
  • 2007
    Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, Carolyn Rosé, Frank Fischer, Armin Weinberger, and Karsten Stegmann. Context based classification for automatic collaborative learning process analysis. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), 2007.
  • 2007
    Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, and Carolyn Rosé. A feature based approach to leveraging context for classifying newsgroup style discussion segments. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics — Demo and Poster Sessions (ACL Poster), 2007.
  • 2005
    Yi-Chia Wang, Jian-Cheng Wu, Tyne Liang, and Jason S. Chang. Web-based unsupervised learning for query formulation in question answering. In Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), 2005.
  • 2004
    Yi-Chia Wang, Jian-Cheng Wu, Tyne Liang, and Jason S. Chang. Using the web as corpus for unsupervised learning in question answering. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING), 2004.

Journal Articles

  • 2022
    Raj Sanjay Shah, Faye Holt, Shirley Anugrah Hayati, Aastha Agarwal, Yi-Chia Wang, Robert E. Kraut, and Diyi Yang. Modeling motivational interviewing strategies on an online peer-to-peer counseling platform. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, volume 6, number CSCW2, pages 1–24. ACM, 2022.
  • 2015
    Yi-Chia Wang, Robert E. Kraut, and John M. Levine. Eliciting and receiving online support: using computer-aided content analysis to examine the dynamics of online social support. Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), volume 17, page e99. JMIR Publications Inc., 2015.
  • 2008
    Carolyn Rosé, Yi-Chia Wang, Yue Cui, Jaime Arguello, Karsten Stegmann, Armin Weinberger, and Frank Fischer. Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically: Exploiting the advances of computational linguistics in computer-supported collaborative learning. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL), volume 3, pages 237–271. Springer, 2008.
  • 2007
    Rohit Kumar, Carolyn Penstein Rosé, Yi-Chia Wang, Mahesh Joshi, and Allen Robinson. Tutorial dialogue as adaptive collaborative learning support. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (FAIA), volume 158, page 383. IOS Press, 2007. Nomination for Best Student Paper

Others

  • 2024
    Kristen M. Altenburger, Hongda Jiang, Robert E. Kraut, Yi-Chia Wang, and Jane Dwivedi-Yu. Examining the role of relationship alignment in large language models. arXiv:2410.01708, 2024. arXiv
  • 2020
    Yi-Chia Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Runze Wang, Zhaleh Feizollahi, Gokhan Tur, and Robert Kraut. Can you be more social? Injecting politeness and positivity into task-oriented conversational agents. arXiv:2012.14653, 2020. arXiv
  • 2020
    Alexandros Papangelis, Mahdi Namazifar, Chandra Khatri, Yi-Chia Wang, Piero Molino, and Gokhan Tur. Plato dialogue system: A flexible conversational AI research platform. arXiv:2001.06463, 2020. Open Source
  • 2019
    Q. Vera Liao, Yi-Chia Wang, Timothy Bickmore, Pascale Fung, Jonathan Grudin, Zhou Yu, and Michelle Zhou. Human-agent communication: Connecting research and development in HCI and AI. In Companion Publication of the 2019 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 2019. Panel
  • 2019
    Li Chen, Yi-Chia Wang, and Qi Dong. Determining safety risk using natural language processing. September 17, 2019. US Patent 10,417,343. Patent

Research & Work Experience

Jul 2024 – Present
Visiting Scholar
Stanford University — Human-Centered AI (Stanford HAI), Palo Alto, CA

Hosted by Prof. Michael Bernstein (CS Department, HCI Group) and Prof. Jeff Hancock (Communication Department, Social Media Lab).

  • AI for well-being and mental health: investigating the impact of AI technologies on social media user well-being.
  • Trust and safety: examining misinformation consumption during the U.S. Presidential Election and deriving design implications.
  • LLM alignment: understanding the role of social relationship alignment in large language models.
Jul 2020 – May 2024
Research Scientist
Meta AI, Menlo Park, CA
Reality Lab — LLMs for Human-Computer Interaction
  • Focused on integrating large language models (LLMs) into AR devices (Meta Smart Glasses) to provide seamless user experiences and conversations.
  • Tech led two production projects to personalize user experiences on smart glasses by leveraging LLMs with controlled hallucination.
  • Collaborated with the Generative AI team to develop Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming (MART), a framework for improving LLM safety through automatic iterative adversarial red-teaming.
Responsible AI / AI Integrity / Affective Computing
  • Proposed and led end-to-end development of a comment/conversation understanding service predicting >30 user affects from comments and conversations, used by >10 Facebook and Instagram ranking systems.
  • Built and deployed a machine learning model to detect personal attacks and conflicts in Facebook group comments, alerting administrators and moderators; A/B tests showed significant decrease in harmful content.
Aug 2016 – Jun 2020
Research Scientist
Uber AI, San Francisco, CA
Conversational AI
  • Focused on natural language generation and the understanding of human–bot interaction in conversational AI.
  • Driver Assistant: a personal assistant allowing driver partners to accomplish tasks via voice controls.
  • Plato Research Dialogue System: a platform for building, training, and deploying conversational AI agents to conduct state-of-the-art research and quickly create prototypes.
Applied Machine Learning — Customer Support & User Satisfaction
  • COTA: applied NLP and ML techniques to build models for automatic ticket routing, customer service improvement, and efficient incident response.
  • Built a natural language processing platform for Uber.
Sep 2006 – Dec 2015
Research Assistant
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Project: Conversational Dynamics in Online Support Groups
  • Developed machine learning models to enable fast and accurate automated coding of conversation contents in online support groups.
  • Used statistical methods to analyze machine-coded data and infer the underlying mechanisms of social interactions.
Project: TagHelper
  • Lead developer and innovator on the TagHelper tools project, a tool for researchers to support automated content analysis of language corpora; reached over 1,000 users in 56 countries.
Apr 2013 – Dec 2014
Core Data Scientist (Remote Contractor)
Facebook, Menlo Park, CA
  • Collaborated with Facebook on PhD dissertation research.
Jan 2013 – Apr 2013
Core Data Scientist Intern
Facebook, Menlo Park, CA
  • Studied how the perception of audience affects users' behavior on Facebook, including privacy settings, engagement, content production, and language usage.
  • Outcome: Paper accepted at CSCW 2016.
Jun 2012 – Aug 2012
Core Data Scientist Intern
Facebook, Menlo Park, CA
  • Applied topic modeling to understand relationships of topics to audience responsiveness and social tie strength on Facebook.
  • Outcome: Paper accepted at CHI 2013.
May 2010 – Aug 2010
Summer Intern
Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, CA
  • Public and personal opinion mining on Yahoo! Vitality platform and Twitter.
Jan 2006 – Jun 2006
Software / Game Developer
Webi & Neti Internet Services Inc., Taiwan
  • Managed full software development cycle of the first mobile game on the Qualcomm BREW platform.
  • Designed and developed J2ME mobile games.