CSE faculty, students win ACL Outstanding Paper award
Doctoral student Luise Ge, alumnus Ryan Zhang and Professor Yevgeniy Vorobeychik won the Outstanding Paper award from the Association for Computational Linguistics
Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, professor of computer science & engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis; Luise Ge, a McKelvey Engineering doctoral student; and Ryan Zhang, who earned a bachelor’s in computer science from McKelvey Engineering in 2026, recently won the Outstanding Paper Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Large language models (LLMs), used either as decision support systems or in agentic workflows, are quickly changing the digital ecosystem. Ge, Zhang and Vorobeychik’s paper, "Mind the (DH) Gap! A Contrast in Risky Choices Between Reasoning and Conversational LLMs," examines how LLMs make decisions under uncertainty. Their work found significant differences in behavior between reasoning models (LLMs optimized for mathematical reasoning) and conversational models (those optimized for conversation), with the former often behaving similarly to risk-neutral rational decision makers (as distinct from typical human behavior which is sensitive to risk), and being less sensitive to the manner in which options are presented than the latter.
The award was announced at the 64th Annual Meeting of the ACL, a global conference for AI researchers, engineers and students specializing in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics, held July 2-6, 2026, in San Diego.
Click on the topics below for more stories in those areas
Back to NewsFaculty in this story
