Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
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Twitter I am an Assistant Professor of the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech, where I lead the Natural Language Processing Lab. At VT CS, I'm also a member of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Discovery Analytics.
Prior to VT, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC where I worked with Heng Ji. I have also worked at Singapore Management University, Microsoft Rsearch Asia, IBM Watson Research, and Allen Institute AI (AI2). I am a recipient of the 2019 AI2 Fellowship, 2021 Amazon Research Award and 2023 NSF CAREER award.
My primary research interests are in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. I'm interested in building efficient models and benchmarks that can encourage machines to perform human-level intelligence. My current research interests include:
- Extracting structured knowledge with limited supervision: information extraction with (weak) supervision, automatic schema induction, knowledge-enpowered information extraction, few/zero shot learning
- Multimodal reasoning, especially multimodal script induction, generation and inference
- Natural language understanding and reasoning by leveraging external knowledge and commonsense
- Natural language generation
- Representation learning: domain adaptation, cross-lingual transfer, multi-modality learning
I'm always looking for highly motivated students to work with me on broad NLP research. Please feel free to reach out and apply!
News and Highlights
(5/1/23) : We have 5 papers accepted by ACL'23! Congrats to Zhiyang, Ying, Minqian, Sijia and all collaborators!
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(3/31/23): Our work on Multimodal Fact Checking is accepted by SIGIR'23 Resource Track. Congrats to Barry!
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(3/28/23): Very grateful to receive the NSF CAREER Award!
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(3/10/23): Congrats to Zhiyang, Minqian and Ying on receiving internship offers from Amazon Alexa AI, AWS Research Lab (NYC) and Apple Research.
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(12/20/22): Check out our recent arXiv that introduces the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark resource and model.
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(12/18/22): Serving as a SAC for the Information Extraction area of ACL'2023 and SPC of IJCAI'2023.
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(10/28/22): We are grateful to receive a gift fund from Google and Intuit.
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(10/26/22): Our team - HokieBot is selected as one of the 9 university teams for the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5. We are grateful for all the support from Amazon Alexa.
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(10/9/22): Serving as a publication committee co-chair of ACL'2023.
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(10/6/22): Two papers on long text generation and federated learning on knowledge graphs accepted by EMNLP'2022.
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(9/30/22): Talk at USC AI Seminar: "Towards Open World Event Extraction with Weak Supervision".
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(8/15/22): Our work on Incremental Prompting for Continual Event Detection is accepted by COLING'22. Congrats to Minqian!
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(8/1/22): Serving as Area Chair (AC) for COLING'2022 and Senior Program Committee (SPC) for AAAI'2023.
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(6/22/22): Initiated workshop "Indirect, Weak and Self Supervision for Knowledge Extraction" accepted by AKBC2022. Call For Papers!
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(6/21/22): We are very grateful to receive a new grant from Meta AI to support our research on multimodal entity linking.
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(4/7/22): Our work on Temporal Event Relation Extraction is accepted by NAACL'2022. Congrats to Shuaicheng!
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(3/31/22): Recent talks at UNC Greensboro, STR, Baidu and Data Intelligence Workshop on Transferable and Scalable Event Extraction
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(3/30/22): Our work on Commonsense Prompting for Future Event Generation is accepted by SIGIR'2022.
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(2/24/22): Two papers are accepted by ACL'2022. Congrats to Sijia and Zhe.
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(12/28/21): Congrats to Sijia and Zhiyang on receiving internship offers from Amazon AWS Research Lab (NYC) and Alexa AI.
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(12/15/21): Will give a tutorial on New Frontiers of Information Extraction at NAACL'2022.
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(12/10/21): Very excited to receive a new grant for the DARPA KMass program.
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(12/1/21): One paper on multi-modal question answering accepted by AAAI'2022.
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