My research lies at the intersections of machine learning, natural language processing, and social media. I focus on designing algorithms for learning semantics from large data for natural language understanding, and generation in particular with stylistic variations. I recently received the NSF CRII Award, Criteo Faculty Research Award, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Award, Best Paper Award at COLING'18, as well as research funds from DARPA. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my PhD in Computer Science from New York University where I was a MacCracken Fellow, MS and BS from Tsinghua University.
I am a senior area chair for ACL 2020 (generation), and an area chair for EMNLP 2020 (generation), AAAI 2020 (NLP), ACL 2019 (semantics), NAACL 2019 (generation), EMNLP 2018 (social media), COLING 2018 (semantics), EMNLP 2016 (generation), a workshop chair for ACL 2017, and the publicity chair for EMNLP 2019, NAACL 2018 and 2016. I also created the Twitter API tutorial and a new course on Social Media and Text Analytics.
I am looking for one or a few new PhD students every year. Here is a note to prospective students.
April 2020, three long papers accepted to ACL 2020! We are releasing (1) new high-quality dataset and Transformer-based model for text simplification; (2) fine-grained named entity and code recognition for StackOverflow; (3) a unified span-based neural network framework and benchmark leaderboard for 10+ NLP tasks.
March 2020, serving as the Area Chair (generation) for EMNLP 2020.
Jan 2020, the SARI score I designed for evaluating text generation models is now part of the official release of the TensorFlow tensor2tensor library. Thanks to Afroz, Alexander, Lukasz!
My approach to natural language understanding is learning and modeling paraphrases on a much larger scale and with a much broader range than previous work, essentially by developing more robust machine learning models and leveraging social media data. These paraphrase can enable natural language systems to handle errors (e.g., “everytime” ↔ “every time”), lexical variations (e.g., “oscar nom’d doc” ↔ “Oscar-nominated documentary”), rare words (e.g “NetsBulls series” ↔ “Nets and Bulls games”), and language shifts (e.g. “is bananas” ↔ “is great”). We designed a series of unsupervised and supervised learning approaches for paraphrase identification in social media data (also applicable to question/answer pairs [COLING'18] for QA systems), ranging from neural network models [COLING'18][NAACL'18a] to multi-instance learning [TACL'14][EMNLP'16], and crowdsourcing large-scale datasets [SemEval'15][EMNLP'17].
Natural Language Generation / Stylistics
Many text-to-text generation problems can be thought of as sentential paraphrasing or monolingual machine translation. It faces an exponential search space larger than bilingual translation, but a much smaller optimal solution space due to specific task requirements. I advocate for a text-to-text generation framework, building on top of machine translation technologies. My recent work uncovered multiple serious problems in previous research (2010 and 2014) on text simplification [TACL'15] , designed a new tunable metric SARI [TACL'16] which is effective for evaluation and as a learning objective for training (now added by the Google AI group to TensorFlow), optimized syntax-based machine translation models [TACL'16], created pairwise neural ranking models to for lexical simplification [EMNLP'18], and studied document-level simplification [AAAI'20]. Our newest Transformer-based model initialized with BERT is the current state-of-the-art for automatic text simplification [ACL'20a]. I am interested in text generation for style transfer [COLING'12] and stylistics in general (e.g. historic ↔ modern, non-standard ↔ standard [BUCC'13], feminine ↔ masculine [AAAI'16]).
Understanding and Generating Human Language
Feb 2020, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Jan 2020, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
Dec 2019, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Learning for Unlimited Human Language
Dec 2018, Peking University, Beijing, China
Learning Large-scale Paraphrases for Natural Language Understanding and Generation
Jun 2018, Midwest Machine Learning Symposium, Chicago, IL
May 2018, Facebook, Menlo Park, CA
May 2018, Twitter, San Francisco, CA
May 2018, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA
Nov 2017, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York
How AI Understand Language?
Mar 2018, Women in Analytics Conference (Main-stage Panel)
Can Paraphrase be a Ultimate
Solution for NLU and NLG?
July 2017, Google Research, New York, NY
Paraphrase ≈ Monolingual Translation
Aug 2016, Amazon, Berlin, Germany
Multiple-instance Learning from Unlimited Text
Dec 2016, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
Sep 2016, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
May 2016, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Apr 2016, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Apr 2016, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Mar 2016, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Mar 2016, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Mar 2016, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
Mar 2016, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada (CS Seminar)
Feb 2016, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN (Computer Science Colloquium Series)
Feb 2016, Washington University, St Louis, MI (Computer Science & Engineering Colloquia Series)
Feb 2016, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Feb 2016, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB , Canada (Special Lecture)
Feb 2016, Yale University, New Haven, CT (CS Talk)
Oct 2015, University of Maryland, College Park, MD (CLIP Colloquium)
Oct 2015, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH (Clippers Seminar)
Large-scale Paraphrase Acquisition from Twitter
May 2015, DARPA DEFT PI Meeting, Boulder, CO
Learning and Generating Paraphrases from Twitter and Beyond [poster]
Apr 2015, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Apr 2015, Columbia University, New York, NY (NLP Talk)
Feb 2015, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (CLIP Colloquium)
Paraphrases in Twitter [slides]
Feb 2015, Twitter, San Francisco, CA
Modeling Lexically Divergent Paraphrases in Twitter (and
Shakespeare!) [poster] Mar 2015, The City University of New York, New York, NY (NLP Seminar)
Feb 2015, IBM Research - Almaden, San Jose, CA
Feb 2015, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Feb 2015, UT Austin, Austin, TX (Forum for Artificial Intelligence)
Dec 2014, Yahoo! Research, New York, NY
Nov 2014, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA (CL+NLP Lunch Seminar)
Aug 2014, Microsoft Research,
Redmond, WA (Visiting Speaker Series)
Incremental Information Extraction
Apr 2012, Stanford Research Institute, Palo Alto, CA
May 2011, IARPA's
KDD PI Meeting, San Diego, CA
Information Extraction Research
Jan 2011, University of Washington,
Seattle, WA
Event-based Summarization
Nov 2009, Thomson Reuters, Eagan,
MN
Mar 2007, France Telecom, Beijing,
China
Miscellaneous
When I have spare time, I enjoy visiting art museums, swimming, running, and snowboarding.
