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 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.

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.

Curriculum vitae: PDF

news

07/25	Attending ACL in Vienna next week where we’re presenting two papers (Abstention Survey, Mitigating Overconfidence) and I’m giving a talk at the SDP workshop.
06/27	Our paper “Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing” introduces a new dataset resource to assess PDF accessibility evaluation and has been accepted to ACM ASSETS!
06/10	Our paper “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Identification of Cyanosis in ICU Settings” (led by Izzy Chaiken) has been accepted to the AMIA Symposium!
05/27	New preprint led by Jihan Yao: “MMMG: a Comprehensive and Reliable Evaluation Suite for Multitask Multimodal Generation”
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!

select recent publications

Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing

Anukriti Kumar, Tanushree Padath, and Lucy Lu Wang

ASSETS Oct 2025

PDF Bib

@article{kumar2025benchmarkingPA,
  title = {Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing},
  author = {Kumar, Anukriti and Padath, Tanushree and Wang, Lucy Lu},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  journal = {ASSETS},
  doi = {10.1145/3663547.3746380},
}

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 HTML 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},
  doi = {10.1145/3715336.3735686},
}

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

May 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},
  month = may,
}

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) May 2025

arXiv ACL 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},
}