Hui's work has recently been accepted into International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2020), which is about dialogue disentanglement. Zhan's work on image captioning has been accepted into ACL-2020 as a long paper. Earlier, the collaboration with Yongfei, Bo, and Xuming's on visual grouding has appeared in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2020). We have two other papers will appear in ACL-2020, which is about few-shot classification and dialogue modelling.

In 2020, Zhan will do a research internship at Samsung's research lab in California; Yufei will do one more internship at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Height, New York; Hui will do a research internship with Amazon's research lab in California.

The shared task that Xiaoyu led in SemEval-2020 (Task 5), "Detecting Counterfactuals", has attracted over 40 submissions in total on two subtasks. The task aims to recognize counterfactuals descriptions, a form of causal reasoning.

In NAACL-2019, I gave a tutorial (with Sam Bowman, NYU) on "deep learning for natural language inference". [slides]

In 2019 summer, Yufei will intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Height, New York.

In the fall of 2019, Hui Liu and Zi'ou Zheng will join my group as PhD students; both Hui and Zi'ou gradutated from Peking University. Zhan Shi joined my group in January 2019 as a PhD student. Zhan received his MSc from Fudan University. Before joining Queen's Zhan has published in top venues and has co-authored a paper that received an outstanding paper award at ACL. Welcome Zhan!

I am excited to have Yufei Feng (Stats MSc, U. Chicago), Xiaoyu Yang (CAS), and Tianda Li (Nankai U) joining my lab in September 2018 as a PhD or MSc student. Yuping Ruan from University of Science and Technology of China will visit my lab. Wecome Everyone! Welcome Yuping!

Served COLING-18 as a Publication Co-Chair.

Served ACL-18 as an Area Chair.

Served COLING-18 as an Area Chair.

From 2018 and 2020, I will be a co-chair of SEMEVAL.

On November 29th 2017, I will give an talk at McMaster.AI at McMaster University.

In November 2017, I reviewed a book proposal for Cambridge University Press.

On October 13th 2017, I helped the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) review six startup companies and their proposals. (CDL is one of the most successful seed-stage programs in Canada.)

The proposal that Prof. Stan Matwin and I submitted to AIR (Alibaba Innovation Research) has been accepted and will be funded.

On August 14th 2017, I gave a keynote talk at the KDD-2017 WISDOM workshop on neural network models for contrasting meaning representation and sentiment composition.

On July 30th 2017, I gave a tutorial (together with Edward Grefenstette, Google DeepMind) on "deep learning for semantic composition" at ACL-2017. [slides][description]

Congratulations to Qian! We developed a model (alpha) that is ranked among the top in RepEval-17 Shared Task [link]. The neural networks attempt to encode the meaning of sentences into fixed-sized vectors; the effectiveness of the models is evaluated with Natural Langauge Inference. [paper]

From July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2019, I will serve a three-year term (part-time) for NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) as an Evaluation Group (EG) Member to evaluate Discovery Grants applications in the area of Computer Science (link).

Employing our Tree-LSTM, Qian Chen's recent work on Natural Language Inference (paper link) has achieved the the state-of-the-art results on the Stanford Natural Language Inference benchmark (link). (Qian is a vistinting student I co-supervised. He will visit me and Diana Inkpen at University of Ottawa.)

Our paper exploring neural nets for semantic compositionality, "DAG-Structured Recurrent Neural Networks for Semantic Compositionality" has been published at NAACL-2016 (link).

On Feb. 22, 2016, I gave a talk at Ottawa Machine Learning Meetup on "Deep Learning for Text Mining: Case Studies on Social Media and Medical Text" (talk announcement).

Between July and November 2015, I gave a couple of talks at the University of Toronto, McGill University, UMass medical school, University of Ottawa, and Baidu Inc. about our recent efforts on neural networks for semantics.

Our paper on semantic compositionality received the Adam Kilgarriff *SEM Best Paper Award for Lexical Semantics at the Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Denver, Colorado. [paper]

Our work on long short-term memory over tree structures has been accepted to International Conference on Machine Learning. Here is the ICML version with updated results [ICML]. The older arXiv version can be found at [ArXiv];

Our paper presented at NIPS-2014 Workshop on Representation and Learning Methods for Complex Outputs [paper]

Gave a tutorial at EMNLP-2014 in Doha on "Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Texts."

In Semeval-2014 Task 9: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter, we ranked first in five of the ten subtask-domain combinations among about 40 teams. In Semeval-2014 Task 4: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis, our models ranked first in three of the six subtasks among about 30 teams. [paper-1][2]

Our ACL-2014 paper on sentiment analysis (negation modeling). [paper]

Our paper on machine translation of sentiment, presented at EACL-2014. [paper]