I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Indiana University Indianapolis, advised by Prof. Hyeju Jang. My research focuses on the reliability of language understanding in large language models. I study when models’ judgments and responses reflect the meaning of a text, and when they are sensitive to how that meaning is expressed. My recent work examines this question through metaphor and discourse coherence. In ongoing work, I investigate how models preserve uncertainty in language and use representation analysis to explore the internal processes underlying their behavior.

🔍 I am seeking research internship opportunities for Summer 2027 in LLM evaluation, reliability, and interpretability.

🔥 News

• 2026.06:  🎉 Our paper “A Mirage of Coherence: How Metaphor Impacts Language Models’ Discourse Coherence Assessment” has been accepted to COLM 2026 and selected for an Oral Spotlight Presentation!

📝 Publications

For a complete list of publications, please see my Google Scholar.

• A Mirage of Coherence: How Metaphor Impacts Language Models’ Discourse Coherence Assessment
  Wanting Ning, Brian Choi, Eun Jin Paek, Hyeju Jang.
  Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026. Spotlight Oral.

• GDLLM: A Global Distance-aware Modeling Approach Based on Large Language Models for Event Temporal Relation Extraction
  Jie Zhao, Wanting Ning, Yuxiao Fei, Yubo Feng, Lishuang Li.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, 8080–8091.
  [Paper] [PDF] [DOI]

• Temporal Cognitive Tree: A Hierarchical Modeling Approach for Event Temporal Relation Extraction
  Wanting Ning, Lishuang Li, Xueyang Qin, Yubo Feng, Jingyao Tang.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, 855–864.
  [Paper] [PDF] [DOI]

• ProBioRE: A Framework for Biomedical Causal Relation Extraction Based on Dual-head Prompt and Prototypical Network
  Lishuang Li, Wanting Ning.
  2023 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 2071–2074.
  [Paper] [DOI]

📖 Educations

• 2025.08 - Present, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science, Indiana University Indianapolis.
• 2022.08 - 2025.06, M.S. in Computer Technology, Dalian University of Technology.