About
I am a Sr. Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and my main research interests are in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, deep learning, neural conversational models, neural text generation, machine translation, and text and speech summarization. My current research focuses primarily on deep learning methods for conversational intelligence. More information about my work on Google Scholar and LinkedIn, and in my CV (Updated October 2021).
News:
- 2021: Area chair for NeurIPS-21 and AAAI-22.
- 2021: Senior area chair for ACL-21.
- 2021: Served in NAACL-21 organizing committee (workshop co-chair).
- 2021: Our Interactive Grounded Language Understanding (IGLU) competition has been accepted at NeurIPS. Please consider participating.
- 5/2021: RetGen released (DialoGPT with grounding): paper and code.
- 2020: Steering committee member for Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC) (2020-).
- 2020: Action editor for TACL (2020-).
- 2020: Area chair for ACL-20 and AACL-20.
- 9/2019: DialoGPT released: large-scale pretrained model for dialogue (paper, download).
- 9/2019: Top-400 reviewer at NeurIPS 2019.
- 9/2019: Our Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC) workshop proposal has been accepted at AAAI-20! Please consider submitting a resesarch paper (details TBA) or registering a system.
- 6/2019: Jianfeng Gao and I presented a tutorial on Neural Approaches to Conversational AI at ICML-19. Slides: [pdf], [Powerpoint].
- 6/2019: Outstanding Reviewer Award (top 5%) at ICML 2019.
- 2019: Area chair for ACL-19 and CoNLL-19, and senior PC at IJCAI-19 and AAAI-20.
- 2/2019: Our survey paper on Neural Approaches to Conversational AI, with Jianfeng Gao (MSR AI) and Lihong Li (Google AI), was published in Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval.
- 6/2018-1/2019: The MSR NLP group organized a shared task on end-to-end grounded conversational AI at Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC7). See the details of the task to download the data and evaluate your own systems.
- 7/2018: Jianfeng Gao (MSR AI), Lihong Li (Google AI) and I presented a tutorial on Neural Approaches to Conversational AI at SIGIR-18 and ACL-18. Slides: [PowerPoint] (with animations) and [PDF].
Academic Background:
2007-2009 Postdoc in Computer Science, Stanford University, Supervisor: Christopher Manning
2007 Ph.D. in Computer Science, Columbia University, Dissertation advisor: Kathleen McKeown
2002 M.Sc. in Computer Science, Columbia University
2001 Diploma in Computer Science, EPFL, Thesis advisor: Hervé Bourlard