Erica Cai
I am a fifth year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised by Prof. Brendan T. O'Connor. I am a member of UMass NLP and the Statistical Social Language Analysis lab. My research interests are broadly in knowledge graphs, natural language processing, and computational social science. Currently, my research is related to node ranking in attributed graphs and information extraction. My publications are in Research and several papers are in submission.
Throughout Fall 2023 to Spring 2025, I have been working part-time at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and during the summers I am an AI/ML research intern there. Previously in graduate school, I worked with Prof. David Jensen and my research was in causal structure learning, causal inference, and explainable artificial intelligence. Before graduate school, I worked with Prof. Eric Allender in computational complexity theory and with Prof. Janne Lindqvist in developing methods to explore the privacy and security of ephemeral messages.
Recent News
- July, 2024: Paper accepted at Journal of Law and Courts; attended the Graph Exploitation Symposium in MIT Endicott House.
- May, 2024: Paper accepted at ACL (Findings); started my second summer research internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
- April, 2024: Gave a talk at International Conference of Complex Networks in Exeter (UK) on low-resource information extraction and identification of influential nodes in knowledge graphs. The paper was published as part of Complex Networks XV, in Springer Nature.
- December, 2023: Presented our poster on a new zero-shot event extraction method at the NeurIPS Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following Workshop in New Orleans.
- November, 2023: Presented our poster on a new zero-shot event extraction method at Text as Data in Amherst.
- August, 2023: Presented our poster at the Graph Exploitation Symposium in MIT Endicott House on targeted few-shot fine-grained NER and relation extraction.
- July, 2023: Travelled to ACL in Toronto to present our paper on evaluating zero-shot event extraction methods and gave a talk about my event extraction research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
- May, 2023: Started my internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory broadly on information extraction for constructing knowledge graphs.
- April, 2023: Gave a talk and presented our poster on zero-shot event extraction at New England NLP.
- March, 2023: Strict Scrutiny, a podcast about the Supreme Court, mentioned our paper.
In my free time, I play tennis and play the piano, and like to travel.
