I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Cincinnati, where I established and direct the CincyNLP Lab. My research covers multiple aspects of how AI understands and interacts with people, including meaning, emotion, and social behavior, studied through where they live in the model’s representations, what that geometry tells us about model behavior, and how to make the findings actionable. I believe we still need better interpretability methods to turn the study of AI into a science, and thus make AI safer and more trustworthy. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah, advised by Prof. Ellen Riloff. Before that, I got my B.S. in Mathematics from Nanjing University.
@misc{vennemeyer2026sycophanticpraise,
title={Sycophantic Praise: Evaluating Excessive Praise in Language Models},
author={Daniel Vennemeyer and Phan Anh Duong and Meryl Ye and Ruihong Huang and Tianyu Jiang},
year={2026},
eprint={2606.07441},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07441},
}
@misc{liu2026crosslingualsteeringfigurative,
title={Cross-Lingual Steering for Figurative Language Generation},
author={Linfeng Liu and Tiffany Zhan and Louie Hong Yao and Saptarshi Ghosh and Tianyu Jiang},
year={2026},
eprint={2605.30443},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30443},
}
@misc{tang2026measuringllmsycophancy,
title={Measuring LLM Sycophancy under Sustained Multi-Turn Pressure},
author={Leyuan Tang and Kangda Wei and Tianyu Jiang and Ruihong Huang},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.09090},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09090},
}
@misc{vennemeyer2026sycophancythingcausalseparation,
title={Sycophancy Is Not One Thing: Causal Separation of Sycophantic Behaviors in LLMs},
author={Daniel Vennemeyer and Phan Anh Duong and Tiffany Zhan and Tianyu Jiang},
year={2026},
eprint={2509.21305},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21305},
}
@misc{bommana2026chiaroscuroemotionscontrastiveemotion,
title={Chiaroscuro for Emotions: A Contrastive Emotion Benchmark Grounded in Appraisal Theory},
author={Divyesh Bommana and Mohammad Saim and Tianyu Jiang},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.03394},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03394},
}
@misc{saim2026emotionallaborstrategypreferences,
title={Emotional Labor Strategy Preferences in LLM Personas},
author={Mohammad Saim and Tianyu Jiang},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.00310},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00310},
}
@misc{boyapati2026privacypreservingheterogeneousmultillmfederated,
title={Privacy-Preserving Heterogeneous Multi-LLM Federated Inference for Cognitive Diagnosis},
author={Yagna Manasa Boyapati and Chong Yu and Tianyu Jiang and Justin Zhan},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.02947},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CR},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02947},
}
@article{yao2026a,
title={A Geometric Lens on {LLM} Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory},
author={Louie Hong Yao and Nicholas Jarvis and Tiffany Zhan and Saptarshi Ghosh and Linfeng Liu and Tianyu Jiang},
journal={Transactions on Machine Learning Research},
issn={2835-8856},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=VQe6p9wn5g},
}
@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-evaluating,
title = "Evaluating the Impact of Verbal Multiword Expressions on Machine Translation",
author = "Liu, Linfeng and
Ghosh, Saptarshi and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.698/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.698",
}
@inproceedings{ghosh-jiang-2026-exploring,
title = "Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens",
author = "Ghosh, Saptarshi and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.705/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.705",
}
@inproceedings{ghosh-jiang-2026-metfuse,
title = "{MetFuse}: Figurative Fusion between Metonymy and Metaphor",
author = "Ghosh, Saptarshi and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.700/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.700",
}
@inproceedings{yao-etal-2026-rhetorical,
title = "Rhetorical Questions in {LLM} Representations: A Linear Probing Study",
author = "Yao, Louie Hong and
Anand, Vishesh and
Zhuang, Yuan and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.5/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.5",
}
@inproceedings{saim-jiang-2026-emotions,
title = "Do Emotions Influence Moral Judgment in Large Language Models?",
author = "Saim, Mohammad and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1346/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.1346",
}
@inproceedings{ghosh-etal-2026-computational,
title = "A Computational Approach to Visual Metonymy",
author = "Ghosh, Saptarshi and
Liu, Linfeng and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (EACL 2026)",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.92/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.92",
}
@inproceedings{yao-etal-2026-towards,
title = "Towards Robust Evaluation of Visual Activity Recognition: Resolving Verb Ambiguity with Sense Clustering",
author = "Yao, Louie Hong and
Jarvis, Nicholas and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
year = "2026",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-eacl.32/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.32",
}
@inproceedings{hutson-etal-2025-guessinggame,
title = "{G}uessing{G}ame: Measuring the Informativeness of Open-Ended Questions in Large Language Models",
author = "Hutson, Dylan and
Vennemeyer, Daniel and
Deshmukh, Aneesh and
Zhan, Justin and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025)",
year = "2025",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.876/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.876",
}
@inproceedings{chundru-etal-2025-llms,
title = "Do {LLM}s Encode Frame Semantics? Evidence from Frame Identification",
author = "Chundru, Jayanth Krishna and
Poddar, Rudrashis and
Cao, Jie and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025)",
year = "2025",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1499/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1499",
}
@inproceedings{saim-etal-2025-anatomy,
title = "Anatomy of a Feeling: Narrating Embodied Emotions via Large Vision-Language Models",
author = "Saim, Mohammad and
Duong, Phan Anh and
Luong, Cat and
Bhanderi, Aniket and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
year = "2025",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1276/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1276",
}
@inproceedings{duong-etal-2025-cheer,
title = "{CHEER}-{E}kman: Fine-grained Embodied Emotion Classification",
author = "Duong, Phan Anh and
Luong, Cat and
Bommana, Divyesh and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)",
year = "2025",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-short.88/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-short.88",
}
@inproceedings{ghosh-jiang-2025-conmec,
title = "{C}on{M}e{C}: A Dataset for Metonymy Resolution with Common Nouns",
author = "Ghosh, Saptarshi and
Jiang, Tianyu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2025)",
year = "2025",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.330/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.330",
}
@inproceedings{zhuang-etal-2024-heart,
title = "My Heart Skipped a Beat! Recognizing Expressions of Embodied Emotion in Natural Language",
author = "Zhuang, Yuan and
Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2024)",
year = "2024",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.193/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.193",
}
@phdthesis{jiang2023commonsense,
title={Commonsense Knowledge of Prototypical Functions for Natural Language Processing},
author={Jiang, Tianyu},
year={2023},
school={The University of Utah}
}
@inproceedings{jiang-riloff-2023-exploiting,
title = "Exploiting Commonsense Knowledge about Objects for Visual Activity Recognition",
author = "Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
year = "2023",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.457/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.457",
}
@inproceedings{jiang-riloff-2022-identifying,
title = "Identifying Physical Object Use in Sentences",
author = "Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022)",
year = "2022",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.781/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.781",
}
@inproceedings{jiang-riloff-2021-learning,
title = "Learning Prototypical Functions for Physical Artifacts",
author = "Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL 2021)",
year = "2021",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.540/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.540",
}
@inproceedings{jiang-riloff-2021-exploiting,
title = "Exploiting Definitions for Frame Identification",
author = "Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021)",
year = "2021",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.206/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.206",
}
@inproceedings{zhuang-etal-2020-affective,
title = "Affective Event Classification with Discourse-enhanced Self-training",
author = "Zhuang, Yuan and
Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020)",
year = "2020",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.452/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.452",
}
@inproceedings{jiang-riloff-2018-learning,
title = "Learning Prototypical Goal Activities for Locations",
author = "Jiang, Tianyu and
Riloff, Ellen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018)",
year = "2018",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/P18-1120/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/P18-1120",
}
@inproceedings{ding2018event,
title={Why Is an Event Affective? Classifying Affective Events Based on Human Needs},
author={Ding, Haibo and Jiang, Tianyu and Riloff, Ellen},
booktitle={Proceedings of the {AAAI}-18 Workshop on Affective Content Analysis ({AFFCON} 2018)},
pages={8--15},
year={2018}
}