Medical
Prioritizing factuality and clinical safety in healthcare QA pipelines.
Multimodal
Developing robust OOD detection for safe multi-turn multimodal dialogue.
Multilingual
Simulating and evaluating L2-English dialogues for educational equity.
Selected Publications
Focused on building responsible and interactive Conversational AI through the lens of linguistics, clinical safety, and multimodal reasoning.
Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases
Rena Gao, X Wu, T Kuribayashi, M Ye, S Qi, C Roever, Y Liu, Z Yuan, JH Lau
Impact: Information-theoretic analysis of L1 interference in LLM-simulated L2 dialogues.
Moderation Matters: Measuring Conversational Moderation Impact in English as a Second Language Group Discussion
Rena Gao, MB Chen, L Frermann, JH Lau
Impact: Evaluating how different moderation strategies impact engagement in ESL group chats.
Interaction matters: An evaluation framework for interactive dialogue assessment on English ESL conversations
Rena Gao, C Roever, JH Lau
Impact: A new scoring framework focusing on micro-level linguistic signals for interactivity.
From posts to timelines: Modeling mental health dynamics from social media timelines with hybrid LLMs
Z Wang, H Na, Rena Gao, J Ma, Y Hua, L Chen, W Wang
Impact: Ranked 3rd in CLPsych 2025 Shared Task for mental health dynamics modeling.
'No' Matters: Out-of-Distribution Detection in Multimodality Multi-Turn Interactive Dialogue
Rena Gao, X Wu, S Luo, C Han, F Liu
Impact: Addressing safety in multimodal agents via DIAEF framework for OOD detection.
An Interpretable and Crosslingual Method for Evaluating Second-Language Dialogues
Rena Gao, J Wu, C Roever, X Wu, J Wu, L Lv, JH Lau
Impact: Developing interpretable metrics for L2 dialogue across different source languages.
Engineering & Systems
Translating cutting-edge research into robust, industry-grade AI solutions.
L2-Moderator Framework
Conversational AI / ESL
An automated moderation and assessment system for ESL discussion groups. Integrates engagement metrics with multi-dimensional moderation strategy suggestions.
Medical RAG Pipeline
Healthcare NLP
A question-answering system designed for oncology patients, significantly reducing medical hallucinations through query rewriting and pipeline optimization.