Research Interests
My research interests lie in natural language processing (NLP), data mining, and artificial intelligence, with emphasis on natural language interfaces (NLIs) to texts, tables, knowledge graphs, relational databases and computer programs (i.e., question answering, semantic parsing, program synthesis) and making such NLIs interactive and conversational to help users complete tasks through dialogue (i.e., task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational AI).
We aim to develop advanced models and systems that enable users to easily query big data, write compute programs, collaborate with each other, and acquire knowledge for decision making in various domains such as healthcare, education, and business. Our vision is to develop human-centered intelligent agents that communicate in natural language to boost human productivity and well-being, and that are transparent and interactive to help humans understand them and allow humans to intervene.
News
Publications (Full list) & Awards
- 01/2023: Multitask Prompt Tuning Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning was accepted to ICLR 2023 main conference! Congratulations to Zhen Wang and collaborators!
- 10/2022: Iteratively Prompt Pre-trained Language Models for Chain of Thought was accepted to EMNLP 2022 main conference (long paper)! Congratulations to my student Boshi Wang and Xiang Deng!
- 10/2022: Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again was accepted to EMNLP 2022 (Findings). Congratulations to Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez and other collaborators!
- 06/2022: OSU TacoBot team earned the third-place honor ($50K) in the first Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge! 10 teams were selected worldwide out of 125 initiated applications to participate in the challenge in May 2021 and 5 teams were selected into finals in April 2022. We are the only US team in the top-3 performers! Check out our report and project website here.
- 04/2022: Thrilled to receive the Google Research Scholar Award! Many thanks to my collaborators and sponsors at Google!
- 01/2022: TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning was selected for the highly prestigious 2022 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award! Congratulations to my student Xiang Deng and all collaborators!
- 12/2021: CliniQG4QA: Generating Diverse Questions for Domain Adaptation of Clinical Question Answering won the Best Paper Award at 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM, long paper)! Congratulations to my student Xiang Yue, Xinliang Zhang, and all collaborators!
- 08/2021: ReasonBert: Pre-trained to Reason with Distant Supervision was accepted to EMNLP 2021 main conference (long paper)! Congratulations to my student Xiang Deng and all collaborators!
- 08/2021: COUGH: A Challenge Dataset and Models for COVID-19 FAQ Retrieval was accepted to EMNLP 2021 main conference (short paper)! Congratulations to my student Frederick Zhang (now at UMichigan), Heming Sun (now at USC), and Xiang Yue!
- 08/2021: I am going to co-present a tutorial "From Tables to Knowledge: Recent Advances in Table Understanding" at SIGKDD'21 with Jay Pujara, Pedro Szekely, and Muhao Chen from University of Southern California.
- 07/2021: I gave a talk on Natural Language Interfaces to an AI group in Texas. Feel free to check out the video.
- 05/2021: TopNet: Learning from Neural Topic Model to Generate Long Stories was accepted to SIGKDD 2021 (research track, acceptance rate: ~15.4%)! Congratulations to Boyuan Pan and all other collaborators!
- 05/2021: Differential Privacy for Text Analytics via Natural Text Sanitization was accepted to Findings of ACL 2021 (long paper)! Congratulations to my student Xiang Yue and all collaborators!
- 03/2021: Structure-Grounded Pretraining for Text-to-SQL was accepted to NAACL 2021! Congratulations to Xiang Deng and collaborators at MSR!
- 01/2021: Learning Structural Edits via Incremental Tree Transformations was accepted to ICLR 2021! Congratulations to Ziyu Yao and collaborators at CMU (Frank F. Xu, Pengcheng Yin, and Graham Neubig)!
- 11/2020: Our workshop proposal on Natural Language Processing for Programming was accepted. Please stay tuned and submit your fine work to our workshop (to be held at ACL 2021)! Congratulations to all co-organizers at Bar-Ilan University, UT Austin, CMU, and OSU!
- 10/2020: Our paper on Clinical Phrase Mining with Language Models was accepted to BIBM 2020! Code is available here! Congratulations to Tommy Yue, Kaushik Mani, Bernal Jimenez at OSU and collaborators at Nationwide Children's Hospital!
- 10/2020: Our paper on Modeling Context Pair Interaction for Pairwise Tasks on Graphs was accepted to WSDM 2021! Congratulations to Zhen Wang in our group and collaborators at NEC Labs!
- 10/2020: Our paper on Table Understanding through Representation Learning was accepted to VLDB 2021! Code is available here! Congratulations to Xiang Deng in our group and collaborators at Google Research!
- 09/2020: Two papers on interactive semantic parsing and cost-effective annotation for QA were accepted to EMNLP 2020 (long)! One paper on adversarial training for code retrieval was accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2020 (long). Congratulations to students at OSU (Ziyu Yao, Yiqi Tang, and Jie Zhao) and collaborators at Facebook AI research and ETH!
- 04/2020: Two papers on biomedical/clinical NLP were accepted to ACL 2020 (long)! One is towards interpretable medical relation prediction ("Rationalizing Medical Relation Prediction from Corpus-level Statistics") and the other focuses on a comprehensive study of a popular EMR-based QA dataset ("Clinical Reading Comprehension: A Thorough Analysis of the emrQA Dataset"). Code and papers are available! Congratulations to students at OSU (Zhen Wang, Tommy Yue, and Bernal Jimenez) and collaborators at Nationwide Children's Hospital!
- 03/2020: Thrilled to receive the NSF CAREER award!
- 03/2020: Honored to receive the 2020 Lumley Research Award from College of Engineering at OSU!
- 02/2020: We are very excited to receive the Google Faculty Research Award!
- 10/2019: Our funded research project is selected to highlight by CoE@OSU and ARO!
- 10/2019: Together with Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Wen-tau Yih, and Yu Su, we are going to organize a workshop on Natural Language Interfaces: Challenges and Promises in ACL 2020! Please stay tuned.
- 09/2019: Our work on biomedical network embedding (a systematic comparison of 11 advanced graph embedding methods for 4 biomedical prediction tasks) was accepted to Bioinformatics. We also released the trained embeddings for each dataset including those for a large set of clinical terms.
- 08/2019: A unified, principled formulation on Interactive Semantic Parsing, titled with "Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Formulation and A Text-to-SQL Case Study", was accepted to EMNLP’19 (long paper).
- 08/2019: Using Web Tables to improve the classic relation extraction task, titled with "Leveraging 2-hop Distant Supervision from Table Entity Pairs for Relation Extraction", was accepted to EMNLP’19 (long paper).
- 05/2019: Our work on "Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning for Conversational Question Generation" was accepted to ACL’19 (long paper).
- 04/2019: Our work on "SurfCon: Synonym Discovery on Privacy-Aware Clinical Data" was accepted to SIGKDD’19 (research track, acceptance rate: ~14.2%, oral presentation).
- 04/2019: Our work on "Riker: Mining Rich Keyword Representations for Interpretable Product Question Answering" was accepted to SIGKDD’19 (research track, acceptance rate: ~14.2%, poster presentation).
- 01/2019: Our work on "CoaCor: Code Annotation for Code Retrieval with Reinforcement Learning" was accepted to WWW’19 (acceptance rate: 18%, Oral + Poster). We explored using the code retrieval task performance to guide the learning of a code annotator (i.e., machine-machine collaboration between code retrieval and code annotation/summarization).
- 11/2018: Our work on “Interactive Semantic Parsing for If-Then Recipes via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning” was accepted to AAAI’19 (acceptance rate: 16.2%).
- 11/2018: Our work on “Answer Identification from Product Reviews for User Questions by Multi-task Attentive Networks” was accepted to AAAI’19 (acceptance rate: 16.2%).
- 07/2018: Our paper "A Comprehensive Study of StaQC for Deep Code Summarization,” an extension study of our <natural language question, code snippet> dataset mined from Stack Overflow in WWW 2018, was accepted in KDD 2018 Deep Learning Day (SPOTLIGHT)!
- 12/2017: Our work on mining large-scale high-quality <natural language question, code snippet> pairs got accepted in WWW 2018. This is our very first work along the research line to facilitate Computer Science for All. Please check our datasets, code, and paper here!
- 06/2017: Our work on answer triggering got accepted in EMNLP 2017. Please let Jie or me know if you have any suggestions!
- 01/2017: Got tired of simple question answering? Try out our characteristic-rich question set! Any suggestions are welcome. ;)
- 12/2016: Our paper "Reliable Medical Diagnosis from Crowdsourcing: Discover Trustworthy Answers from Non-Experts" was accepted in WSDM 2017
- 09/2016: Our paper "An Augmented LSTM Framework to Construct Medical Self-diagnosis Android" was accepted in ICDM 2016
- 07/2016: Our paper "On Generating Characteristic-rich Question Sets for QA Evaluation" was accepted in EMNLP 2016
- 07/2016: Received SIGKDD 2016 Ph.D. Dissertation Runner Up Award
Students & Services & Outreach (Selected Activities)
- 01/2023: I will serve as an Area Chair for ACL 2023!
- 12/2022: Congratulations to Zhen Wang for a successful Ph.D. defense and for a postdoc position jointly hosted by UCSD/MBZUAI/CMU.
- 11/2022: Congratulations to Xiang Deng for winning the prestigious Presidential Fellowship (Only 1 in CSE in 2022)! "The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by the Graduate School. Recipients of this award embody the highest standards of scholarship in the full range of Ohio State's graduate programs."
- 04/2022: Congratulations to Undergraduate Ron Chen for winning the University Fellowship and joining OSU NLP group as a Ph.D. student!
- 03/2022: Congratulations to Ron Chen and Zhen Wang for winning the annual Undergraduate Research Award and Graduate Research Award in CSE, respectively!
- 05/2021: Congratulations to Ziyu Yao for joining George Mason (CS) as Assistant Professor in the coming Fall!
- 12/2020: Congratulations to Zhen Wang for being selected to attend the 2021 Rising Stars in Data Science Workshop hosted by UChicago!
- 12/2020: Congratulations to my undergraduate student Xinliang (Frederick) Zhang for being awarded the highly competitive CRA Undergraduate Research Award (Honorable Mention)!
- 11/2020: Congratulations to Ziyu Yao for being awarded the highly prestigious Presidential Fellowship (Only 1 in CSE in 2020)!
- 11/2020: Congratulations to Jie Zhao for successfully defending his thesis! Jie will be our first Ph.D. graduate and will join Amazon Alexa Shopping team.
- 10/2020: Congratulations to Ziyu Yao for being selected into Rising Stars 2020!
- 10/2020: I will serve as an Area Chair for NAACL 2021!
- 07/2020: Co-organized and co-hosted the first workshop on Natural Language Interfaces at ACL'20!
- 06/2020: Invited to review for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)!
- 03/2020: Ph.D. student Ziyu Yao, Zhen Wang, and Xiang Deng will intern at Carnegie Mellon University, NEC labs, and Microsoft Research this summer. Congratulations!
- 11/2019: Undergraduate research assistant Frederick Zhang was awarded a scholarship by CoE towards “Research Distinction” or “Honors Research Distinction". Congratulations!
- 11/2019: Ph.D. student Jie Zhao is to intern at Outreach (startup) for the coming 5 months. Congratulations!
- 2019 - 2020: Happy to serve as a faculty mentor in the OSU Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, which aims to diversify the STEM workforce by increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in STEM degrees, with an emphasis on improving community college pathways to STEM degrees through collaborative faculty and peer mentoring programs.
- 08/2019: Session Chair at SIGKDD 2019.
- 03/2018-05/2019: Honored to serve as Publicity Co-chair and Session Chair for SDM 2019.
- 03/2018: Invited to be Review Editor in Data Mining and Management, part of the journal Frontiers in Big Data and AI.
- 03/2018: Ph.D. student Ziyu Yao will intern at Microsoft Research, Redmond this coming summer to work on Reinforcement Learning + NLP. Congratulations!
- 11/2017: Ph.D. student Ziyu Yao’s summer internship experience at Fujitsu Laboratories of America was reported by OSU TDAI.
- 01/2017: I am on the program committee of SIGKDD 2017, ACL 2017, EMNLP 2017, CIKM 2017 (senior PC), IJCAI-BOOM 2017 (Please consider submitting to BOOM)
Grants
- 12/2022: We are excited for being selected to participate in the second Amazon Alexa Taskbot Challenge.
- 04/2022: We are thankful for being funded by Cisco to build transparent interactive natural language interfaces to relational databases.
- 03/2022: We are thrilled for being funded by Google Research Scholar Award to empower large pre-trained language models for complex reasoning.
- 07/2021: We are thrilled for being funded by the NSF AI institute and to develop natural language and conversational interfaces to help users query data, build models, and write programs towards the ultimate goal of democratizing AI.
- 05/2021: We are grateful for being funded by the President’s Research Excellence Grant in collaboration with Dr. Xia Ning and Dr. Xiaoxue Wang.
- 05/2021: We are excited for being selected (10 out of 125 applicant teams) to participate in the first Amazon Alexa Taskbot Challenge.
- 03/2020: We are grateful for being funded by the NSF Early CAREER program.
- 02/2020: We are thankful for being funded by Google.
- 08/2018: We are thankful for being funded by the NSF core small program for our research.
- 11/2017: We are thrilled and thankful for receiving a PCORI grant in collaboration with Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
- 09/2017: We are grateful for receiving an ARO grant for our research.
- 03/2017: We received a gift grant from Fujitsu Laboratories of America. Thanks, Fujitsu!
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to NSF, PCORI, ARO, Google, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Cisco, and Ohio Supercomputer Center for their generous support of our research.
