Dr. Jie Cao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma, where he directs the OUNLP lab. His group builds trustworthy AI that supports human communication and collaboration, and develops intelligent systems that accelerate progress in science, education, and healthcare. He is also affiliated with the Data Science and Analytics Institute and TSET Health Promotion Research Center at OU. Before joining OU, he spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming (iSAT) at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he mainly worked with Dr. James Martin and Dr. Martha Palmer. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he worked with Dr. Vivek Srikumar. Earlier in his academic journey, he completed his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science at Huazhong University of Science of Technology~(HUST) in China, and he has also worked/interned in industrial companies including Alibaba, Baidu, Sohu, WeChat(@Palo Alto), and Amazon, etc.

Research Interests

We advance natural language processing and machine learning toward trustworthy AI that supports human communication and collaboration — and develop intelligent systems that accelerate progress in science, education, and healthcare. Current research directions include:

Multi-party, multi-modal dialogue and discourse analysis for Human-AI Teaming~(e.g., Mental Health, Education)
LLM/MLLM alignment and agents grounded in domain-specific “world” models, and AI for Science~(e.g., Hydrology, Material Science)
Efficient structured prediction and symbolic methods for controlling and augmenting neural networks
Robust deployment and evaluation of trustworthy AI

News

08/2026: Our paper “A Hyperparameter Tuning Strategy for an LSTM Model to Simulate Reservoir Outflows: Large-Scale Evaluation across 441 Dams in the CONUS” is accepted to Journal of Hydrology!
06/2026: Invited to serve as an NSF Review Panelist.
06/2026: Our paper “AI Agent for Hydrologic Modeling: Definition, Development and Application” is accepted to Geophysical Research Letters!
06/2026: Our paper “Rethinking On-policy Optimization for Query Augmentation” is accepted to TMLR!
06/2026: Our paper “Beyond Supervised Clarification: Input Rewriting with LLMs for Dialogue Discourse Parsing” has been accepted to SIGDIAL 2026. Congratulations to Yiming!
05/2026: Awarded ICAST seed grant ICAST.
05/2026: A new preprint on “HydroAgent: Closing the Gap Between Frontier LLMs and Human Experts in Hydrologic Model Calibration via Simulator-Grounded RL”
05/2026: Two collaborative projects funed by NSF ART: InTRO Scoping Translational Research. ART Scoping.
05/2026: Congratulations to the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) awardees Brendan Richards, Cuong Huynh, and Santiago Leon for their undergraduate research fundings.
05/2026: Congratulations to the Honors Research Apprenticeship Program (HRAP) awardees Nicholas Immenschuh and Addison Lin for their undergraduate research fundings.
05/2026: Thanks for the kind computing credits support from Modal.com, Modal.
05/2026: Our proposal has been awarded by Association of Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) 2026 Small Grants for Studies of AI-Client Simulations, ACES.
04/2026: Our paper on “LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Attacks on Cooperative Spectrum Sensing” is accepted to ICCCN 2026.
04/2026: Our paper on multimodal LLM for material science MatterChat is accepted to Nature Machine Intelligence!
02/2026: Congratulations to Cuong and Masiko for receving Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) fellowship for Spring 2026!
01/2026: Our paper on “Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese” got accepted to EACL’2026 Main Conference.
11/2025: Thanks for Thinking Machines for the Tinker Teaching Grant!
11/2025: Invited Talk on “Decoding Classroom Dialogue: Discourse Analysis in STEM Education” at Rice University Ken Kennedy Institute AI Seminar Series
11/2025: New preprint “Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese” is now available on arXiv.
10/2025: New preprint “Rethinking On-policy Optimization for Query Augmentation” is now available on arXiv. We present the first systematic comparison of prompting-based and RL-based query augmentation and introduce a novel hybrid method OPQE that outperforms both approaches.
10/2025: Participating NSF LEVEL-UP AI Round Table and Contributing to the CRA Report on Developing Strategies to Increase Capacity in AI Education.
10/2025: Congratulations to Cuong Huynh! His undergraduate summer research on text simplication has been accepted to TSAR2025 Workshop@EMNLP. Multi-round fine-grained symbolic rules could further refine the LLM-based simiplication.
09/2025: Our collaborative proposal on semic simulation was awarded by Nvidia for 4 Max-Q GPUs.
09/2025: Our proposal on Small Language Model awarded by NSF ACCESS for GPU Credits.
08/2025: Thrilled to share that our paper using state space model for reservoir release has been accepted in Journal of Hydrology. Grateful to my coauthors for guiding me into the hydrology journey alongside AI.
08/2025: One paper on frame semantics and LLM got accepted to EMNLP’2025 Main Conference!
08/2025: Congratulations to Tiffany and Ava for receiving the Undergraduate Engineering Research Fellowship for Fall 2025!
07/2025: One paper on “AQUAH: Automatic Quantification and Unified Agent in Hydrology” got accepted to ICCV’2025 Workshop on Sustainability with Earth observation and AI.
05/2025: Congratulations to Masiko Mamba on being awarded the Undergraduate Engineering Research Fellowship for Summer 2025.
04/2025: Our paper on multi-perspective discourse analysis on teaching and tutoring dialogue got accepted to EDM2025.
04/2025: I was awarded Alternative Textbook Grant on practical course content on recent advances in LLM and Agentic AI.
03/2025: Invited Talk in Graduate Student Community@Gallogly College of Engineering: Advances in Open LLM
02/2025: New preprint on multimodal LLM on material science MatterChat.
11/2024: Our paper “Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom Teaching Discourse” got accepted to COLING’2025.
11/2024: Our paper on visualization for network pruning got accepted to TVCG.
10/2024: Invited Talk on “Modularized Conversational Modeling” at the OU DISC.
09/2024: Talk with students on “History of NLP” at the OU AI/ML Club.
07/2024: Our paper on dialogue classification via LLM finetuning is accepted to L@S’24.
02/2024: Invited Talk on “Modularized Conversational Modeling” at Emory University, Georgia State University.
11/2023: In Fall 2023, I taught NLP class~(CSCI-LING 5832) with James Martin. I newly created course materials on LLMs, In-Context Learning, Dialogue Generation, etc.
05/2023: Our paper on Question Generation accepted to BEA’23
05/2023: A short paper on “Mind the Gap between the Application Track and the Real World” got accepted to ACL’23
04/2023: Our paper on “A Comparative Analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition Errors in Small Group Classroom Discourse” got accepted to UMAP’23.
03/2023: My research on conversational simulation on small-group discussion got awarded by iSAT Trainee Grant.
02/2023: Our paper on AI agent for Jigsaw Classrooms got accepted on AIAIC’23.
12/2022: Our paper on Dependency Dialog Act got accepted on IWSDS’23.
12/2022: Invited Talk on Database Workload Characterization work at Microsoft’s Gray Systems Lab. Slides.
08/2022: I joined NSF AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming (iSAT) as a post-doctoral researcher.
06/2022: New preprint on visual analysis of neural network pruning.

Selected Publications

(See full list in Publication Page or Google Scholar)

SIGDIAL

Yiming Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Zhichao Xu, Xin Yu, Yingheng Tang, Tianyu Jiang, and Jie Cao. 2026. Beyond Supervised Clarification: Input Rewriting with LLMs for Dialogue Discourse Parsing. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2026) (To Appear). BibTeX

@inproceedings{liu2026sigdial,
  title = {Beyond Supervised Clarification: Input Rewriting with LLMs for Dialogue Discourse Parsing},
  author = {Liu, Yiming and Zhang, Ziyue and Xu, Zhichao and Yu, Xin and Tang, Yingheng and Jiang, Tianyu and Cao, Jie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2026) (To Appear)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01964},
}

| URL | Code

arXiv

Zhi Li, Songkun Yan, Jie Cao, Mofan Zhang, Anjiang Wei, Jinwoong Yoo, and Yang Hong. 2026. HydroAgent: Closing the Gap Between Frontier LLMs and Human Experts in Hydrologic Model Calibration via Simulator-Grounded RL. BibTeX

@misc{li2026hydroagentclosinggapfrontier,
  title = {HydroAgent: Closing the Gap Between Frontier LLMs and Human Experts in Hydrologic Model Calibration via Simulator-Grounded RL},
  author = {Li, Zhi and Yan, Songkun and Cao, Jie and Zhang, Mofan and Wei, Anjiang and Yoo, Jinwoong and Hong, Yang},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2605.17792},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.LG},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17792}
}

| URL

EACL

Zilong Li and Jie Cao. 2026. Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical Chinese into Japanese. In Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, and Lluís Marquez, editors, Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6031–6045, Rabat, Morocco, March. Association for Computational Linguistics. BibTeX

@inproceedings{li2025translation,
  title = {Translation via Annotation: A Computational Study of Translating Classical {C}hinese into {J}apanese},
  author = {Li, Zilong and Cao, Jie},
  editor = {Demberg, Vera and Inui, Kentaro and Marquez, Llu{\'i}s},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month = mar,
  year = {2026},
  address = {Rabat, Morocco},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.285/},
  pages = {6031--6045},
  isbn = {979-8-89176-380-7}
}

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TMLR

Zhichao Xu, Shengyao Zhuang, Xueguang Ma, Bingsen Chen, Yijun Tian, Fengran Mo, Tao Li, Jie Cao, and Vivek Srikumar. 2026. Rethinking On-policy Optimization for Query Augmentation. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, June. BibTeX

@article{xu2025rethinking,
  title = {Rethinking On-policy Optimization for Query Augmentation},
  author = {Xu, Zhichao and Zhuang, Shengyao and Ma, Xueguang and Chen, Bingsen and Tian, Yijun and Mo, Fengran and Li, Tao and Cao, Jie and Srikumar, Vivek},
  journal = {Transactions on Machine Learning Research},
  issn = {2835-8856},
  year = {2026},
  month = jun,
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=mmqbjhz5Br},
}

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Nat. Mach. Intell.

Yingheng Tang, Wenbin Xu, Jie Cao, Weilu Gao, Steven Farrell, Benjamin Erichson, Michael W. Mahoney, Andy Nonaka, and Zhi Jackie Yao. 2026. A Multimodal Large Language Model for Materials Science. Nature Machine Intelligence, April. BibTeX

@article{tangMultimodalLargeLanguage2026,
  title = {A Multimodal Large Language Model for Materials Science},
  author = {Tang, Yingheng and Xu, Wenbin and Cao, Jie and Gao, Weilu and Farrell, Steven and Erichson, Benjamin and Mahoney, Michael W. and Nonaka, Andy and Yao, Zhi Jackie},
  year = {2026},
  month = apr,
  journal = {Nature Machine Intelligence},
  issn = {2522-5839},
  doi = {10.1038/s42256-026-01214-y},
}

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EDM

Jannatun Naim, Jie Cao, Fareen Tasneem, Jennifer Jacobs, Brent Milne, James Martin, and Tamara Sumner. 2025. Towards Actionable Pedagogical Feedback: A Multi- Perspective Analysis of Mathematics Teaching and Tutoring Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, pages 328–341. International Educational Data Mining Society, July. BibTeX

@inproceedings{naim2025edm,
  title = {Towards Actionable Pedagogical Feedback: A Multi- Perspective Analysis of Mathematics Teaching and Tutoring Dialogue},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Educational Data Mining},
  author = {Naim, Jannatun and Cao, Jie and Tasneem, Fareen and Jacobs, Jennifer and Milne, Brent and Martin, James and Sumner, Tamara},
  year = {2025},
  month = jul,
  pages = {328--341},
  publisher = {International Educational Data Mining Society},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15870177},
  venue = {Palermo, Italy},
  url = {https://educationaldatamining.org/EDM2025/proceedings/2025.EDM.long-papers.201/index.html}
}

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COLING

Jie Cao, Abhijit Suresh, Jennifer Jacobs, Charis Clevenger, Amanda Howard, Chelsea Brown, Brent Milne, Tom Fischaber, Tamara Sumner, and James H. Martin. 2025. Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom Teaching Discourse. In The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics. BibTeX

@inproceedings{talkmove-coling-2024,
  title = {Enhancing Talk Moves Analysis in Mathematics Tutoring through Classroom
      Teaching Discourse},
  author = {Cao, Jie and Suresh, Abhijit and Jacobs, Jennifer and Clevenger, Charis and Howard, Amanda and Brown, Chelsea and Milne, Brent and Fischaber, Tom and Sumner, Tamara and Martin, James H.},
  booktitle = {The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2025}
}

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L@S

Baptiste Moreau-Pernet, Yu Tian, Sandra Sawaya, Peter Foltz, Jie Cao, Brent Milne, and Thomas Christie. 2024. Classifying Tutor Discursive Moves at Scale in Mathematics Classrooms with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, pages 361–365. Association for Computing Machinery. BibTeX

@inproceedings{talkmove-llm-2024,
  author = {Moreau-Pernet, Baptiste and Tian, Yu and Sawaya, Sandra and Foltz, Peter and Cao, Jie and Milne, Brent and Christie, Thomas},
  title = {Classifying Tutor Discursive Moves at Scale in Mathematics Classrooms with Large Language Models},
  year = {2024},
  isbn = {9798400706332},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3657604.3664664},
  doi = {10.1145/3657604.3664664},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale},
  pages = {361–365},
  numpages = {5},
  keywords = {discourse analysis, llm classification, math tutor training},
  location = {Atlanta, GA, USA},
  series = {L@S '24}
}

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UMAP

Jie Cao, Ananya Ganesh, Jon Cai, Rosy Southwell, Magerate Perkoff, Michael Regan, Katharina Kann, James Martin, Martha Palmer, and Sideny D’Mello. 2023. A Comparative Analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition Errors in Small Group Classroom Discourse. Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling Adaptation and Personalization. BibTeX

@article{cao-umap23,
  title = {A Comparative Analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition Errors in Small
    Group Classroom Discourse},
  author = {Cao, Jie and Ganesh, Ananya and Cai, Jon and Southwell, Rosy and Perkoff, Magerate and Regan, Michael and Kann, Katharina and Martin, James and Palmer, Martha and D'Mello, Sideny},
  journal = {Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on User Modeling Adaptation
      and Personalization},
  year = {2023}
}

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VLDB

Debjyoti Paul*, Jie Cao*, Feifei Li, and Vivek Srikumar. 2021. Database Workload Characterization with Query Plan Encoders. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 15(4):923–935. BibTeX

@article{cao2021dbqencoder,
  title = {Database Workload Characterization with Query Plan Encoders},
  author = {{Debjyoti Paul}* and {Jie Cao}* and Li, Feifei and Srikumar, Vivek},
  journal = {Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},
  volume = {15},
  number = {4},
  pages = {923--935},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {VLDB Endowment},
}

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NAACL

Jie Cao and Yi Zhang. 2021. A Comparative Study on Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 782–796. BibTeX

@inproceedings{cao2021comparative,
  title = {A Comparative Study on Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking},
  author = {Cao, Jie and Zhang, Yi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  pages = {782--796},
  year = {2021},
}

| PDF | Code | Poster

CoNLL

Jie Cao, Yi Zhang, Adel Youssef, and Vivek Srikumar. 2019. Amazon at MRP 2019: Parsing Meaning Representations with Lexical and Phrasal Anchoring. In Proceedings of the Shared Task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing at the Conference on Natural Language Learning, pages 138–148. BibTeX

@inproceedings{cao2019amazon,
  title = {Amazon at MRP 2019: Parsing Meaning Representations with Lexical and
      Phrasal Anchoring},
  author = {Cao, Jie and Zhang, Yi and Youssef, Adel and Srikumar, Vivek},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Shared Task on Cross-Framework Meaning
      Representation Parsing at the Conference on Natural Language
        Learning},
  pages = {138--148},
  year = {2019},
}

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ACL

Jie Cao, Michael Tanana, Zac Imel, Eric Poitras, David Atkins, and Vivek Srikumar. 2019. Observing Dialogue in Therapy: Categorizing and Forecasting Behavioral Codes. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. BibTeX

@inproceedings{cao2019observing,
  title = {Observing Dialogue in Therapy: Categorizing and Forecasting Behavioral Codes},
  author = {Cao, Jie and Tanana, Michael and Imel, Zac and Poitras, Eric and Atkins, David and Srikumar, Vivek},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  location = {Florence, Italy},
}

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Academic Service

Standing Reviewer for Journals: Computational Linguistics
Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review(ARR)
PC Member / Reviewer for Conferences and Workshops: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, SIGDIAL, EACL, COLING, CoNLL, COLM, AAAI, ACL Rolling Review, AIED, EDM, MRP’2019, BEA, NLP4ConvAI, AmericasNLP’23, SLaTE’23, Agent Skills