Dan Schumacher
2026
Telling Speculative Stories to Help Humans Imagine the Harms of Healthcare AI
Xingmeng Zhao | Tongnian Wang | Dan Schumacher | Veronica Rammouz | Anthony Rios
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xingmeng Zhao | Tongnian Wang | Dan Schumacher | Veronica Rammouz | Anthony Rios
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare, enabling the fast development of tools such as stress monitors, wellness trackers, and mental health chatbots. However, this rapid and low-barrier development can also introduce risks, including bias, privacy violations, and unequal access, especially when systems overlook real-world contexts, diverse user needs, and cultural settings. Many recent approaches use AI to identify such risks automatically, but this can reduce human engagement in understanding how harms arise, who they affect, and which stakeholder needs remain unspoken. We present a human-centered ethical foresight framework that generates speculative user stories and supports multi-agent discussions to help people reflect on potential benefits and harms of healthcare AI before deployment. In a user study, participants who engaged with stories identified a broader range of harms, distributing their responses more evenly across all 17 harm types, whereas those who did not engage with stories focused primarily on privacy and well-being (79.1%). Overall, our findings suggest that storytelling helps people anticipate potential risks and benefits and reflect more broadly on how AI systems may affect different users, contexts, and often unspoken needs.
2025
RASTeR: Robust, Agentic, and Structured Temporal Reasoning
Dan Schumacher | Fatemeh Haji | Tara Grey | Niharika Bandlamudi | Nupoor Karnik | Gagana Uday Kumar | Cho-Yu Jason Chiang | Peyman Najafirad | Nishant Vishwamitra | Anthony Rios
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Dan Schumacher | Fatemeh Haji | Tara Grey | Niharika Bandlamudi | Nupoor Karnik | Gagana Uday Kumar | Cho-Yu Jason Chiang | Peyman Najafirad | Nishant Vishwamitra | Anthony Rios
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Temporal question answering (TQA) remains a persistent challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings where retrieved content may be irrelevant, outdated, or temporally inconsistent. This is especially critical in applications like clinical event ordering, policy tracking, and real-time decision-making, which require reliable temporal reasoning even under noisy or misleading context. To address this challenge, we introduce RASTeR: Robust, Agentic, and Structured, Temporal Reasoning, an agentic prompting framework that separates context evaluation from answer generation. RASTeR first assesses the relevance and temporal coherence of retrieved context, then constructs a structured temporal knowledge graph (TKG) to better facilitate reasoning. When inconsistencies are detected, RASTeR selectively corrects or discards context before generating an answer. Across multiple datasets and LLMs, RASTeR consistently improves robustness: defined here as the model’s ability to generate correct predictions despite suboptimal context. We further validate our approach through a “needle-in-the-haystack” study, in which relevant context is buried among irrelevant distractors. Even with forty distractors, RASTeR achieves 75% accuracy, compared to the runner-up model, which reaches only 62%.
Charting the Future: Using Chart Question-Answering for Scalable Evaluation of LLM-Driven Data Visualizations
James Ford | Xingmeng Zhao | Dan Schumacher | Anthony Rios
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
James Ford | Xingmeng Zhao | Dan Schumacher | Anthony Rios
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
We propose a novel framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. Traditional evaluation methods often rely on human judgment, which is costly and unscalable, or focus solely on data accuracy, neglecting the effectiveness of visual communication. By employing VQA models, we assess data representation quality and the general communicative clarity of charts. Experiments were conducted using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. Our results indicate that LLM-generated charts do not match the accuracy of the original non-LLM-generated charts based on VQA performance measures. Moreover, while our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting significantly boosts the accuracy of chart generation, considerable progress remains to be made before LLMs can fully match the precision of human-generated graphs. This underscores the importance of our work, which expedites the research process by enabling rapid iteration without the need for human annotation, thus accelerating advancements in this field.
2024
Team UTSA-NLP at SemEval 2024 Task 5: Prompt Ensembling for Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedures with GPT4
Dan Schumacher | Anthony Rios
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
Dan Schumacher | Anthony Rios
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
In this paper, we present our system for the SemEval Task 5, The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure Challenge. Legal argument reasoning is an essential skill that all law students must master. Moreover, it is important to develop natural language processing solutions that can reason about a question given terse domain-specific contextual information. Our system explores a prompt-based solution using GPT4 to reason over legal arguments. We also evaluate an ensemble of prompting strategies, including chain-of-thought reasoning and in-context learning. Overall, our system results in a Macro F1 of .8095 on the validation dataset and .7315 (5th out of 21 teams) on the final test set. Code for this project is available at https://github.com/danschumac1/CivilPromptReasoningGPT4.