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Joni Isbell is a third-year Computer Science major studying cross-language alignment with Dr. Hongchen Wu. She also studies LLM suspense detection with Dr. Mark Riedl. 

Joni smiles at the camera

How long have you been an undergraduate researcher at Georgia Tech?

I have been doing research for a full year. I started my research journey with Dr. Hongchen Wu during my summer semester of my sophomore year in 2024. A semester later, I joined Dr. Mark Riedl’s Entertainment Intelligence and Human-Centered AI (EI & HCAI) lab.

How did you get involved with undergraduate research?

Throughout my time at Georgia Tech, I have been exposed to computer science research through my job as a research communication student assistant at the College of Computing, engaging with my professors, and connecting with my peers. After taking one of Dr. Wu’s Chinese Mandarin courses, I looked into her research and was fascinated. I reached out to learn more and have been working with her ever since. I also wanted to continue to explore different topics within computational linguistics to solidify my research interests. This was my motivation to reach out to the EI & HCAI lab. Research is my passion and I am so grateful for these opportunities.

What are you working on?

Broadly, I explore how to apply linguistic and psychological concepts to computer science and I evaluate how current systems reflect these ideas.

With Dr. Wu, I am conducting cross-language alignment on Thai audio and transcripts. I am analyzing model alignment results to compare the performance of using a high-resource language vs a low-resource but closely linguistically related language as intermediate dictionaries for tonal audio.

In the EI & HCAI lab, I am analyzing industry LLM’s detection of suspense in literature. Influenced by the field Machine Psychology, I am implementing suspense detection papers and comparing human vs AI agreement. We also are conducting adversarial attacks on the models to understand what causes a divergence of agreement.

Joni works at her computer

 

What is your favorite thing about research/researching?

I love being surrounded by such brilliant people. I really appreciate the research community and how supportive and eager to teach they are. Everyday, I learn about new topics, emerging fields, and skills I can use both in my academic and personal life.

What are your future plans and how has research influenced them?

I plan to get a PhD in Computational Linguistics. I would love to lead a research lab that focuses on the intersection of linguistic theory and computer science. Both of my mentors have greatly influenced me and I hope to one day mentor early career researchers in the same way they’ve supported me.

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