Rik Koncel-Kedziorski

My research builds AI systems that reason transparently about the people they interact with. I work on methods for interpersonal reasoning — training language models to make sense of the psychological states, beliefs, and preferences underlying observed user behavior — with the broader goal of turning AI from monolithic knowledge sources into collaborators capable of on-the-fly personalization.

This builds on a decade of work on reasoning in AI. Early in my career I focused on formal reasoning, developing foundational datasets and methods for mathematical problem solving (MAWPS, MathQA) and scientific text generation (Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs with Graph Transformers). In industry I extended these ideas to financial reasoning (DocFinQA, BizBench) and to one of the first production-scale generative QA systems at Alexa. My current work brings these threads together by grounding LLM reasoning in validated psychological theory — see PrimeX and Improving Language Model Personas via Rationalization with Psychological Scaffolds (both EMNLP 2025).

I completed my PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington in 2019, advised by Hanna Hajishirzi and Gina-Anne Levow, and continued as a postdoctoral researcher with Noah Smith at UW CSE. Before Apple, I was a Research Scientist at S&P Global Kensho and an Applied Scientist at Amazon.

news

Nov 06, 2025	Gave a keynote at the PALS (Personalization of Language Systems) workshop at EMNLP 2025.
Nov 05, 2025	Improving Language Model Personas via Rationalization with Psychological Scaffolds accepted at EMNLP 2025 (with Brihi Joshi, Xiang Ren, Swabha Swayamdipta, Tim Paek).
Nov 05, 2025	PrimeX: A Dataset of Worldview, Opinion, and Explanation accepted at EMNLP 2025.
Aug 01, 2024	DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset accepted at ACL 2024.
Jun 01, 2024	Received an Apple AI Research Grant for User Representations and Reasoning for Natural Dialogue Systems (with Swabha Swayamdipta, USC).

selected publications

ACL

DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset

Varshini Reddy, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, V. Lai, and 2 more authors

In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024

DOI arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2024docfinqa,
  author = {Reddy, Varshini and Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Lai, V. and Krumdick, Michael and Tanner, Chris},
  title = {DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset},
  year = {2024},
  booktitle = {Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {2=highlight},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2401.06915}
}

ACL

Is GPT-3 Text Indistinguishable from Human Text? Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text

Yao Dou, Maxwell Forbes, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, and 2 more authors

In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022

DOI arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2022is,
  author = {Dou, Yao and Forbes, Maxwell and Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Smith, Noah A. and Choi, Yejin},
  title = {Is GPT-3 Text Indistinguishable from Human Text? Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text},
  year = {2022},
  booktitle = {Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {3=highlight},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.501}
}

AAAI

A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation

Zeqiu Wu, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, and 8 more authors

In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021

DOI arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2021a,
  author = {Wu, Zeqiu and Galley, Michel and Brockett, Chris and Zhang, Yizhe and Gao, Xiang and Quirk, Chris and Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Gao, Jianfeng and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh and Ostendorf, Mari and Dolan, Bill},
  title = {A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation},
  year = {2021},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  author+an = {7=highlight},
  doi = {10.1609/aaai.v35i16.17658}
}

ACL

Explaining Relationships Between Scientific Documents

Kelvin Luu, Xinyi Wu, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, and 3 more authors

In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021

DOI arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2021explaining,
  author = {Luu, Kelvin and Wu, Xinyi and Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Lo, Kyle and Cachola, Isabel and Smith, Noah A.},
  title = {Explaining Relationships Between Scientific Documents},
  year = {2021},
  booktitle = {Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {3=highlight},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.166}
}

NAACL

Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs with Graph Transformers

Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Dhanush Bekal, Yi Luan, and 2 more authors

In North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019

DOI arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2019text,
  author = {Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Bekal, Dhanush and Luan, Yi and Lapata, Mirella and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh},
  title = {Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs with Graph Transformers},
  year = {2019},
  booktitle = {North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {1=highlight},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/N19-1238}
}

NAACL

MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms

Aida Amini, Saadia Gabriel, Shanchuan Lin, and 3 more authors

In North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019

DOI arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2019mathqa,
  author = {Amini, Aida and Gabriel, Saadia and Lin, Shanchuan and Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Choi, Yejin and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh},
  title = {MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms},
  year = {2019},
  booktitle = {North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {4=highlight},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/N19-1245}
}

NAACL

MAWPS: A Math Word Problem Repository

Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Subhro Roy, Aida Amini, and 2 more authors

In North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2016

DOI Bib

@inproceedings{koncel2016mawps,
  author = {Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Roy, Subhro and Amini, Aida and Kushman, Nate and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh},
  title = {MAWPS: A Math Word Problem Repository},
  year = {2016},
  booktitle = {North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {1=highlight},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/N16-1136}
}

ACL

Parsing Algebraic Word Problems into Equations

Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ashish Sabharwal, and 2 more authors

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015

DOI Bib

@article{koncel2015parsing,
  author = {Koncel-Kedziorski, Rik and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh and Sabharwal, Ashish and Etzioni, Oren and Ang, S.},
  title = {Parsing Algebraic Word Problems into Equations},
  year = {2015},
  journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  author+an = {1=highlight},
  doi = {10.1162/tacl_a_00160}
}