Ainur Yessenalina
Author directory2026
Conversation Coach: A Voice-enabled AI System that Helps Practice Difficult Workplace Conversations
Fanyou Wu | Suraj Maharjan | Ainur Yessenalina | Dennis Xu Chen | Rahul Srivastava | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Fanyou Wu | Suraj Maharjan | Ainur Yessenalina | Dennis Xu Chen | Rahul Srivastava | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Effective manager-employee communication is critical for retaining high performers and developing underperformers, yet training managers in these skills remains costly. Text-based chatbots offer a scalable approach but cannot provide realistic rehearsal: managers need to practice speaking aloud to build confidence before high-stakes conversations. In this paper, we propose Conversation Coach, a voice-first AI system that enables managers to rehearse difficult workplace conversations in a realistic spoken format. The system addresses three challenges: achieving low-latency interactions with strong language understanding, enabling adaptive conversations through configurable bot personalities that simulate different employee types, and generating personalized feedback on content and policy compliance. We compare an end-to-end speech-to-speech model with a cascaded approach combining automatic speech recognition, a large language model, and text-to-speech synthesis. The end-to-end approach achieves 3× lower median (P50) latency with native barge-in capability at an estimated 8× lower cost, while the cascaded approach offers superior reasoning essential for coaching quality. We deployed the cascaded architecture in production, where 40,000+ managers used it over six months, with adoption patterns indicating selective use for difficult conversations.
Feedback-Aware Prompt Optimization Framework for Generating Job Postings
Suraj Maharjan | Ainur Yessenalina | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Suraj Maharjan | Ainur Yessenalina | Srinivasan H. Sengamedu
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Job postings are critical for recruitment, yet large enterprises struggle with standardization and consistency, requiring significant time from hiring managers and recruiters. We present a feedback-aware prompt optimization framework that automates high-quality job posting generation through iterative human-in-the-loop refinement. Our system integrates multiple data sources: job metadata, competencies, organization’s compliance guidelines, and organization brand statement, while incorporating human feedback to continuously improve prompt quality through multi-LLM validation. We evaluated our approach using LLM-as-a-judge on 1,056 job postings and human evaluation on a smaller subset across three dimensions: Standardization, Compliance, and User Perception. Our results demonstrate high compliance rates and strong satisfaction scores in both automated and human evaluation, validating the effectiveness of our feedback-aware approach for enterprise job posting generation.
2012
Computational Approaches to Sentence Completion
Geoffrey Zweig | John C. Platt | Christopher Meek | Christopher J.C. Burges | Ainur Yessenalina | Qiang Liu
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Geoffrey Zweig | John C. Platt | Christopher Meek | Christopher J.C. Burges | Ainur Yessenalina | Qiang Liu
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
2011
Compositional Matrix-Space Models for Sentiment Analysis
Ainur Yessenalina | Claire Cardie
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ainur Yessenalina | Claire Cardie
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing