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Welcome to hmr-lab!

Welcome to hmr-lab, a research group within the Siebel School of Computation and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Our group, led by Prof. Julia Hockenmaier, focuses on fundamental topics in natural language processing (NLP).

Our research explores several key areas:

Collaborative dialogue in embodied environments

How do humans communicate to collaboratively solve complex, real-world tasks? We study the dynamics of collaborative dialogue and develop autonomous agents capable of joint problem-solving.

Interpretability of deep language models

How do deep language models represent and process natural language? We explore mechanistic interpretability to better understand and explain the behavior of these models.

Evaluation of long-form text

How can we automatically evaluate the quality of long, complex texts generated by language models? We focus on developing reliable, interpretable methods for assessing long-form text.

Dr. Julia Hockenmaier is a full professor in the Siebel School of Computation and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her main research area is computational linguistics, also known as natural language processing. Before joining Illinois, she was a postdoctoral researcher with Aravind Joshi at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a frequent visitor to Ken Dill’s research group at UCSF. She earned her PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Mark Steedman.

We are part of the larger UIUC NLP group.