About Me
I'm a post-doctoral student at Stanford University, working with Diyi Yang, Sanmi Koyejo and Daniel Ho. My research combines natural language processing, planning and creativity; right now, I am fascinated by tacit knowledge, or everything we know that we cannot put into words. Check out my research!
Interested in working with me? First, please check out my wishlist.
I got my PhD from the University of Southern California, advised by Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng, and Emilio Ferrara. My work has been incorporated at Google Deep Mind, OpenAI, and EleutherAI. Before that, I was a data scientist and journalist at the New York Times where I worked with Dr. Chris Wiggins.
Before that, I studied double bass at the Juilliard School of Music and worked as a professional musician in off-Broadway productions including The Dybbuk and Spears: The Gospel According to Brittney. In my PhD, I organized charity concerts, including raising money for humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
News:
- July 11, 2026 🎨 I co-organized the Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creativity: Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges at ICML 2026 in Seoul, with Adish Singla, Abhilasha Ravichander, Liwei Jiang, and Alice Oh. A survey article grew out of the workshop.
- Oct 23, 2025 🎶 I gave a talk at the Stanford NLP Lunch. The topic was Music + Linguistics, and summarized our ongoing work on music modeling with EleutherAI. Slides.
- Oct 10, 2025 🎙️ I delivered a keynote at the NLP4Democracy workshop at COLM 2025. Event link.
- Sept 15, 2025 🎉 I began my post-doc, jointly funded by Stanford SAIL and HAI and advised by Diyi Yang, Sanmi Koyejo, and Daniel Ho. Announcement.
- Aug 8, 2025 🎓 I defended my thesis!!
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May 3, 2025
🧑🏫 We gave a tutorial at NAACL 2025. Event link.
Creative Planning with Language Models: Practice, Evaluation and Applications with Tenghao Huang, Philippe Laban, and Nanyun Peng
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Nov 14, 2024
🎉🎉 I am so honored to have won two (2) Outstanding Paper Awards at EMNLP 2024.
Do LLM's Plan Like Human Writers? Comparing Journalistic Coverage of Press Releases with LLMs with Mark Dredze, Sebastian Gehrmann, and Nanyun PengAre Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives? with Yufei Tian, Tenghao Huang, Miri Liu, Derek Jiang, Muhao Chen, Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng
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July 23, 2024
🎉 I am so honored to have won a Spotlight Award at ICML 2024.
Stay on Topic with Classifier-Free Guidance with Guillaume Sanchez, Honglu Fan, Elad Levi and Stella Biderman
- Feb 22, 2024 🗣️ I spoke at the Stanford NLP Seminar. The title of my talk is NLP Approaches in Computational Journalism: Newsfinding, Sourcing and Updating Stories.
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July 13, 2022
🎉 I am so honored to have won an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022.
NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Document-Level Reasoning Challenge with Xiang Reg, Nanyun Peng, and Jonathan May
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March 15, 2022
🎶 We are humbled for the support for our Ukraine Benefit Concert. State Senator Scott Weiner and the Ukrainian ambassador gave inspiring speeches, and we raised $60,000.
- April 4, 2020 🎉 I am over the moon to have been awarded a 3 year Bloomberg PhD Fellowship. This will allow me to formulate a multi-year research plan and focus on research in my PhD that I care about.
- Sept 1, 2019 👨🎓 I'm excited to start my PhD at USC!
Awards:
- EMNLP 2024 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award (1 of 30 among 1,271 accepted papers): Do LLMs Plan Like Human Writers? Comparing Journalistic Coverage of Press Releases with LLMs.
- EMNLP 2024 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award (1 of 30 among 1,271 accepted papers): Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?
- ICML 2024 🏆 Spotlight Award (top 3.5% of papers): Stay on Topic with Classifier-Free Guidance.
- C+J 2023 🏆 Best Paper Award (1 of 4 among 40 accepted papers): First Steps Towards a Source Recommendation Engine: Investigating How Sources Are Used in News Articles.
- NAACL 2022 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award (1 of 8 among 442 accepted papers): NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Novel Document-level Reasoning Challenge.
- 2020–2024 🎓 Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship, USC.
- 2019 🎓 Annenberg Graduate Fellowship, USC.
Service:
- Organizer Communications Chair, NAACL 2026. Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creativity, ICML 2026. Tutorial: Creative Planning with Language Models, NAACL 2025.
- Program Committee Computation + Journalism Symposium 2026. AIES 2026.
- Reviewer Nature. ACL Rolling Review (2022–2024). ACL (2020, 2021). The Web Conference (2020). AKBC (2019).
Contact Information:
The best place to reach me is: alexspan@stanford.edu.
Other emails I check are: spangher@usc.edu and alexander.spangher@gmail.com.
