Ivory Yang

ivory.yang.gr [at] dartmouth.edu

Hello! I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Dartmouth, where I am part of the Minds, Machines and Society lab led by Prof. Soroush Vosoughi. My research focuses on social applications of Natural Language Processing, particularly on revitalization of endangered languages and persuasion / mental manipulation.

In what feels like a different lifetime, I received my Bachelor’s of Business Administration and Bachelor’s of Science in Cognitive Science from the University of Michigan. I worked briefly in finance and start-ups in San Francisco, where I was inspired by the vibrant tech scene to take Computer Science courses at Harvard and Stanford. Eventually, I made the leap of faith to formally return to school.

Given my unconventional journey, I am always excited to connect with others and listen to different perspectives. Feel free to reach out if you would like to collaborate!

news

Aug 20, 2025	Two papers were accepted to EMNLP 2025, one Main (first author) and one Findings (co-author)! See you in Suzhou!
May 15, 2025	One paper was accepted to ACL 2025 Findings!
Jan 23, 2025	Two papers were just accepted at NAACL 2025, one as first author and one as third!
Nov 29, 2024	My paper on the Nüshu endangered language is accepted at COLING 2025! This marks my first first-author paper at a major NLP conference!
Nov 20, 2024	Honored to be awarded a $3500 Thomas D. Sayles Research Grant by the Dartmouth Ethics Institute!

selected publications

EMNLP

Recontextualizing Revitalization: A Mixed Media Approach to Reviving the Nüshu Language

Ivory Yang, Xiaobo Guo, Yuxin Wang, Hefan Zhang, and 3 more authors

EMNLP (main conference), 2025

Abs arXiv
ACL

Visibility as Survival: Generalizing NLP for Native Alaskan Language Identification

Ivory Yang, Chunhui Zhang, Yuxin Wang, Zhongyu Ouyang, and 1 more author

ACL (findings), 2025

Abs arXiv
NAACL

Is it Navajo? Accurate Language Detection in Endangered Athabaskan Languages

Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, Chunhui Zhang, and Soroush Vosoughi

NAACL (main conference, oral), 2025

Abs arXiv
COLING

NüshuRescue: Revitalization of the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI

Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, and Soroush Vosoughi

COLING (main conference, oral), 2025

Abs arXiv

The preservation and revitalization of endangered and extinct languages is a meaningful endeavor, conserving cultural heritage while enriching fields like linguistics and anthropology. However, these languages are typically low-resource, making their reconstruction labor-intensive and costly. This challenge is exemplified by Nüshu, a rare script historically used by Yao women in China for self-expression within a patriarchal society. To address this challenge, we introduce NüshuRescue, an AI-driven framework designed to train large language models (LLMs) on endangered languages with minimal data. NüshuRescue automates evaluation and expands target corpora to accelerate linguistic revitalization. As a foundational component, we developed NCGold, a 500-sentence Nüshu-Chinese parallel corpus, the first publicly available dataset of its kind. Leveraging GPT-4-Turbo, with no prior exposure to Nüshu and only 35 short examples from NCGold, NüshuRescue achieved 48.69% translation accuracy on 50 withheld sentences and generated NCSilver, a set of 98 newly translated modern Chinese sentences of varying lengths. A sample of both NCGold and NCSilver is included in the Supplementary Materials. Additionally, we developed FastText-based and Seq2Seq models to further support research on Nüshu. NüshuRescue provides a versatile and scalable tool for the revitalization of endangered languages, minimizing the need for extensive human input.