About Me
I'm a final year PhD student at the University of Southern California's (USC) Information Sciences Institute (ISI), co-advised by Jonathan May and Emilio Ferrara. My research lies in the intersection of natural language processing, planning and creativity. Specifically, I'm interested in modeling how humans execute complicated tasks, like writing news stories, in order to build AI systems that align better with our goals. Check out each of my research lenses:
[Computer Science] | [Computational Journalism]
Before that, I was a data scientist and journalist at the New York Times where I worked with Dr. Chris Wiggins. [Journalism].
Before that, I attended 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. [Music Videos]
News:
I'm on the faculty job market! If you're a hiring chair, please reach out.
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Dec 6, 2024
🧑🏫 We're so excited to have our tutorial accepted at NAACL 2025. This is a tutorial on Creative Planning in Large Language Models. I'll update with more details as we get closer to the conference.
- 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.
This recognizes the works:
- Do LLM's Plan Like Human Writers? Comparing Journalistic Coverage of Press Releases with LLMs with Mark Dredze, Sebastian Gehrmann, and Nanyun Peng
- Are 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. This is a huge honor and I am so grateful to my coauthors at EleutherAI.
This recognizes the work:
- Stay on Topic with Classifier-Free Guidance with Guillaume Sanchez, Honglu Fan, Elad Levi and Stella Biderman.
- Feb 22, 2024 🗣️ I will be speaking at the Stanford NLP Seminar. The title of my talk is NLP Approaches in Computational Journalism: Newsfinding, Sourcing and Updating Stories.
- April 1, 2023 🎉 I am honored to have my Bloomberg PhD Fellowship extended for a 4th year in acknowledgement of our work together.
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July 13, 2022
🎉 I am so honored to have won an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022.
This recognizes the work:
- 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. I, personally, got the chance to play with the most inspiring musicians I have ever had the chance to play with.
- April 4, 2020 🎉 I am over the moon to have been awarded a 3 year Bloomberg PhD Fellowship. I am so grateful to the Bloomberg family for their support. 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!
Contact Information:
The best place to reach me is: spangher@usc.edu.
My personal email address is alexander.spangher@gmail.com.
