Elisa Kreiss

Elisa Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research combines natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and human-computer interaction to explore how communicative context influences language use. Her work has direct applications to image accessibility, focusing on automatically generating image descriptions for blind and low vision users. Kreiss holds a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and a B.S. in Cognitive Science from Osnabrück University. She has received several awards, including the Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2024 and the NeurIPS Top Reviewer Award.

Elisa Kreiss is a researcher at UCLA focusing on human-centered NLP, vision-language alignment, pragmatics, and non-visual accessibility. Her work explores how language and vision interact in human communication, with an emphasis on accessibility for blind and low-vision users. Kreiss investigates methods to improve the interpretability and fairness of language models, particularly through causal reasoning and reference-based evaluation metrics. Her research also addresses challenges in image description generation and the evaluation of data visualization understanding. By integrating insights from linguistics, computer vision, and cognitive science, Kreiss aims to develop systems that are more aligned with human needs and communication practices.