When I was an undergraduate at Beihang University, out of my interest in NLP, I visited Tsinghua University and was fortunately supervised by Prof. Zhiyuan Liu. At Tsinghua, I mainly worked on the application of the KG over NLP and learned the basics about NLP and ML as well as the elemental research skills such as how to analyze the data and design the models. I published two long papers at ACL during my internship at Tsinghua, one on semantic compositionality (2nd author), and the other one on robustness (co-1st-author, although it was published after I left Tsinghua). Achieving the balance between course study and research was definitely difficult for me, but I finally managed that, and my outstanding academic performance won me Shenyuan Medal Nomination Award, the supreme honor for undergraduates at Beihang University.
After I completed my B.Eng at Beihang, I came to Columbia University as a Master’s student. I just found that there were so many good opportunities for research collaboration, which was quite exciting and pushed my research into the next stage. My first collaboration project in the U.S. was over social media data processing, and I was advised by Prof. Smaranda Muresan and Prof. Nabila El-Bassel. We dug out the need for the marginal community during the terrible COVID-19 pandemic using unsupervised topic modeling and designed the corresponding guideline. During my summer internship at IBM Watson, I was mentored by Dr. Mo Yu on narrative QA project, which aimed at answering questions from the narrative text (e.g., novels or movie scripts). Our joint work was published on NUSE @ ACL 2020.
Besides, I also worked with Prof. Jason Eisner and his PhD advisee Hongyuan Mei on continuous-time event stream modeling. I did my visiting research assistant at JHU during Spring 2021.