A contextual measure of ambiguity in prescriptive texts
Sally Dong*, Luke Thorburn*, Andrew Konya, Michiel Bakker
EMNLP 2026 · arXiv
Extended abstract at Workshop on NLP for Democracy, COLM, 2025.
Dong is pronounced “D-oh-n.”
I’m a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Recently I have been working on questions at the intersection of AI and social science.
I completed my PhD in theoretical computer science at the University of Washington, advised by Yin Tat Lee and Thomas Rothvoss. Before that, I studied computer science and pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo.
Publications
Convex optimization with combinatorial characteristics: new algorithms for linear programming, min-cost flow, and other structured problems
PhD thesis, 2024 · PDF
I (aspire to) update the document from time to time, to improve exposition and fix bugs.
Faster min-cost flow and approximate tree decomposition on bounded treewidth graphs
With Guanghao Ye
ESA 2024 · arXiv
The extension complexity of polytopes with bounded integral slack matrices
With Thomas Rothvoss
IPCO 2024 · arXiv
Faster algorithms for separable linear programs
With Gramoz Goranci, Lawrence Li, Sushant Sachdeva, and Guanghao Ye
SODA 2024 · arXiv
Decomposable non-smooth convex optimization with nearly-linear gradient oracle complexity
With Haotian Jiang, Yin Tat Lee, Swati Padmanabhan, and Guanghao Ye
NeurIPS 2022 · arXiv
Nested dissection meets IPMs: planar min-cost flow in nearly-linear time
With Yu Gao, Gramoz Goranci, Yin Tat Lee, Richard Peng, Sushant Sachdeva, and Guanghao Ye
SODA 2022 · arXiv
A nearly-linear time algorithm for linear programs with small treewidth: a multiscale representation of robust central path
With Yin Tat Lee and Guanghao Ye
STOC 2021 · Invited to the SICOMP special issue · arXiv
Computing circle packing representations of planar graphs
With Yin Tat Lee and Kent Quanrud
SODA 2020 · arXiv
Improved bounds for Rota’s basis conjecture
With Jim Geelen
Combinatorica, 2019 · arXiv · Polymath 12 discussion
About
I grew up in Toronto, Canada. Outside of research, I enjoy reading history and current-affairs non-fiction, being in nature, and sometimes dabble in film photography.