Profile

Si Wu （吴斯） Pronouns: she/her/hers

Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
Ph.D. Candidate
Advisor: David Smith
Email: siwu[at]ccs.neu.edu

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Research interests: I am interested in the application of natural language processing to social sciences (linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology in particular) as well as humanities. My current research focuses on multimodality, multilinguality, and cultural representation.

🔊 News

Will be back in sunny San Diego for NeurIPS!! Let's chat about anything translation, multimodality, or culture!

Excited to teach NLP for the first time as an instructor! My slides are shared publicly on the course website. Any feedback is welcome!

Attending the New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) workshop!

Will attend ACL in Vienna! Excited to see old friends and make new friends!

Our paper Uncovering Visual-Semantic Psycholinguistic Properties from the Distributional Structure of Text Embedding Space is accepted at ACL!

I will be attending the New England NLP meeting at Yale. Hope to chat with folks there!

🔎 Research

At Northeastern: multimodality, psycholinguistics, machine translation, and some OCR-related tasks (handwriting recognition, layout analysis, table/figure extraction).

At UC San Diego: font reconstruction, and briefly part of the Print & Probability project with Prof. Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. Flash memory error prediction with Prof. Paul H. Siegel.

📝 Publications

Google Scholar · (* indicates equal contribution)

Papers

Uncovering Visual-Semantic Psycholinguistic Properties from the Distributional Structure of Text Embedding Space
*Si Wu, *Sebastian Bruch. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
[pdf] [code]

Learning from Many Voices: Literary MT Using Multi-Reference Human and Synthetic Data
Si Wu, John Wieting, and David A. Smith. Under review
[arXiv, older version]

Composition and Deformance: Measuring Imageability with a Text-to-Image Model
Si Wu, David A. Smith. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Narrative Understanding (WNU), 2023
[pdf] [code]

Scalable Font Reconstruction with Dual Latent Manifolds
Nikita Srivatsan, Si Wu, Jonathan T. Barron, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021
[pdf]

Digital Editions as Distant Supervision for Layout Analysis of Printed Books (pre-print)
*Alejandro Toselli, *Si Wu, and David A. Smith. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2021
[pdf] [code]

Bad Page Detector for NAND Flash Memory
Yi Liu, Si Wu, and Paul H. Siegel. The 11th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW), 2020
[pdf]

Quantifying Gaze Behavior During Real World Interactions Using Automated Object, Face, and Fixation Detection
Leanne Chukoskie, Shengyao Guo, Eric Ho, Yalun Zheng, Qiming Chen, Vivian Meng, John Cao, Nikhita Devgan, Si Wu, and Pamela C. Cosman. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 2018
[pdf]

Non-archival

Ink and Influence: Historical Evidence from US Partisan Newspapers
Si Wu, David Smith. New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data (TADA) 2023

Data Archaeology for Archival Preservation: Training OCR Models for Knowledge Extraction in Cultural Heritage Collections
Giulia Taurino, Si Wu, David Smith. The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) 2023

Archaeologies of data in contemporary journalism: The digital afterlives of newspapers' photo morgues
Giulia Taurino, Si Wu, David Smith. Computation + Journalism (C+J2022)

👩🏻‍🏫 Teaching

Instructor of record / Lecturer:

TA:

Tutor:

Outreach teaching:

🗣️ Talks

The Quaranta Lab: Uncovering Visual-Semantic Psycholinguistic Properties from the Distributional Structure of Text Embedding Space

The Institute for Experiential AI (EAI): Uncovering Visual-Semantic Psycholinguistic Properties from the Distributional Structure of Text Embedding Space.

Computation + Journalism Conference (C+J2022) at Columbia School of Journalism: Archeologies of Data in Contemporary Journalism: the digital afterlives of newspapers' photo morgues.

🎓 Education

Northeastern University (2020 - Present)
Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of California, San Diego (2016 - 2020)
B.S. in Computer Engineering

🍿 Miscellaneous

In my spare time, I enjoy movies, photography, and singing. I used to work on some hardware projects (Mars rovers, circuits, and embedded systems), so I am always down to build a fun gadget!

Human languages that I speak: English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and French (beginner!).

If you are interested in research, collaboration, or mentorship, feel free to reach out to me!