CSE Colloquium: Deep Contextual Modeling for Natural Language Understanding, Generation, and Grounding

Zoom Information 

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://psu.zoom.us/j/923242125 

Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +16468769923,923242125# or +13126266799,923242125# 

Or Telephone: 

Dial: 

+1 646 876 9923 (US Toll) 

+1 312 626 6799 (US Toll) 

+1 669 900 6833 (US Toll) 

+1 253 215 8782 (US Toll) 

+1 301 715 8592 (US Toll) 

+1 346 248 7799 (US Toll) 

Meeting ID: 923 242 125 

International numbers available: https://psu.zoom.us/u/adBsnTPXaN 

Abstract: Natural language is a fundamental form of information and communication. In both human-human and human-computer communication, people reason about the context of text and world state to understand language and produce language response. In this talk, I will present several deep neural network based systems that first understand the meaning of language grounded in various contexts where the language is used, and then generate effective language responses in different forms for information access and human-computer communication. First, I will introduce Speaker Interaction RNNs for addressee and response selection in multi-party conversations based on explicit representations for different discourse participants. Then, I will present a text summarization approach for generating email subject lines by optimizing quality scores in a reinforcement learning framework. Finally, I will show an editing-based multi-turn SQL query generation system towards intelligent natural language interfaces to databases. 

Biography: Rui Zhang is a final year Ph.D. student at Yale University advised by Professor Dragomir Radev. His research interest lies in various natural language processing problems in understanding, generation, and grounding. He has been working on (1) End-to-End Neural Modeling for Entities, Sentences, Documents, and Multi-party Multi-turn Dialogues, (2) Text Summarization for Emails, News, and Scientific Articles, (3) Cross-lingual Information Retrieval for Low-Resource Languages, (4) Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing in Human-Computer Interaction. Rui Zhang has published papers and served as Program Committee members at top-tier NLP and AI conferences including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, AAAI, CoNLL. During his Ph.D., He has done research internships at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Grammarly Research, and Google AI. He was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and got his bachelor's degrees at both the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University from the UM-SJTU Joint Institute.