Ph.D. students from the University of Houston Department of Computer Science are earning international recognition for their research in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Dana Alsagheer, Michael Yantosca and ChengAo Shen had papers accepted as first authors to the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics held in Vienna, Austria—one of the world’s leading conferences in computational linguistics and AI.
Dana Alsagheer 
Alsagheer and her co-authors published “The Lawyer That Never Thinks: Consistency and Fairness as Keys to Reliable AI.” The paper explores the importance of consistency and fairness in developing trustworthy artificial intelligence systems.
Dana Alsagheer’s Google Scholar Webpage
Michael Yantosca 
Yantosca, working with faculty advisor Albert M. K. Cheng, presented “Phonotomizer: A Compact, Unsupervised, Online Training Approach to Real-Time, Multilingual Phonetic Segmentation.” The research introduces an efficient, language-independent method for tokenizing speech in real time, advancing applications in multilingual speech recognition, language documentation, and assistive technologies in low-resource settings.
Michael Yantosca’s Google Scholar Webpage
ChengAo Shen 
Shen, along with his collaborators, published “Exploring Multi-Modal Data with Tool-Augmented LLM Agents for Precise Causal Discovery.” Their findings demonstrate how large language model agents can enhance causal inference across complex data systems.
ChengAo Shen’s Google Scholar Webpage
“These papers represent the exceptional research contributions of our students and faculty in advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Lennart Johnsson, interim chair of the Department of Computer Science. “Their work not only demonstrates technical excellence but also reflects UH’s growing impact on global AI research.”
The department congratulates Alsagheer, Yantosca and Shen, along with their faculty advisors, Weidong “Larry” Shi, Cheng and Jingchao Ni, for their accomplishments.