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Yong Jiang

Alibaba DAMO Academy

Biography

Hi! I currently work at Alibaba DAMO Academy. I received my Ph.D from the joint program of ShanghaiTech University and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. I was very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Kewei Tu. I am interested in machine learning and natural language processing.

My current research mainly focuses on entity understanding tasks, information retrieval (query/doc understanding), language model pretraining, multilingual NLP, structured prediction and so on. Furthermore, I also ship these cutting-edge technologies to real products and platforms.

In my PhD time, I mainly worked on learning latent variable models for NLP problems and ML problems.

Spotlight of our recent work:

  1. Incorporating various kinds of knowledge to improve named entity recognition: embedding combination, ACE, retrieval guided learning, sparse retrieval, multi-modal NER.
  2. Knowledge distillation for learning multilingual models: structure-level KD, structural KD.
  3. Improving sequence labeling methods: designing powerful potential functions, speeding up CRF training & inference.
  4. Leveraging source models to improve cross-lingual ability: risk minimization, multi-view learning, word reordering.
  5. Unsupervised grammar induction: the first neural-based unsupervised parser, discriminative autoencoder, 2nd order parsing, EACL tutorial and empirical study.
  6. Multi-view learning for NER, entity linking and cross-lingual learning.
  7. Fun with KL divergence: KL(p(*|a, b, c) || p(*|d, e)), KL(P || p), KL(p || q), KL(tractable || intractable?), KL (different modality).

We have some research intern positions available in Alibaba DAMO Academy. If you are interested in NLP and ML, please feel free to contact me: jiangyong.ml@gmail.com.

Interests

  • Natural Language Processing
  • Machine Learning
  • Deep Learning

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2019

    ShanghaiTech University

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2019

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

News

  • [Dec. 2022] With several months efforts, our team releases AdaSeq (Alibaba Damo Academy Sequence Understanding Toolkit). With AdaSeq, it is easy to replicate 30+ SOTA benchmarks for sequence understanding tasks!
  • [Nov. 2022] Forty NER models are deployed at ModelScope!
  • [Oct. 2022] A paper was accepted to EMNLP 2022!
  • [Oct. 2022] A paper was accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2022!
  • [Sep. 2022] Ten SOTA multilingual models are deployed at ModelScope. Have a try for the english, korean, bangla, german, farsi, hindi, dutch, spanish, russian, turkish languages.
  • [Aug. 2022] Two papers were accepted to COLING 2022!
  • [Aug. 2022] Four SOTA Chinese NER models are deployed at ModelScope. Have a try for the generic, news, social media, resume domains!
  • [July. 2022] Our paper wins the Best System Paper Award (1221) at SemEval 2022!
  • [May. 2022] Our team wins the NLPCC 2022 Speech Entity Linking competition on the joint Entity Recognition and Disambiguation task!
  • [Apr. 2022] A paper was accepted to NAACL 2022!
  • [Feb. 2022] Our team wins the SemEval 2022 Multilingual NER competition on 10 tracks over 13 tracks! Checkout our paper
  • [Sep. 2021] Recent talk on multilingual NER
  • [Aug. 2021] Three papers were accepted to EMNLP 2021!
  • [May. 2021] Five papers were accepted to ACL 2021!
  • [May. 2021] A paper was accepted to Findings of ACL 2021!
  • [Apr. 2021] A tutorial was accepted to EACL 2021!
  • [Sep. 2020] Two papers were accepted to COLING 2020!
  • [Sep. 2020] Two papers were accepted to EMNLP 2020!
  • [Sep. 2020] Two papers were accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2020!
  • [Apr. 2020] Two papers were accepted to ACL 2020!
  • [Aug. 2019] Two papers were accepted to EMNLP 2019!

Projects

  • ACE: SOTA systems for 6 tasks, spanning over NER, POS, chunking, dependency parsing, semantic parsing, aspect extraction.
  • KB-NER: SOTA NER systems for over 11 languages.
  • RaNer: a retrieval-based NER system for over multiple domains.
  • MuV: SOTA systems for cross-lingual structured prediction.
  • RiskMinimization: A SOTA system for zero-shot sequence labeling.

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Tencent AI Lab

Jan 2018 – Oct 2018 Shenzhen
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Tencent

Jul 2017 – Sep 2017 Shanghai
 
 
 
 
 

Visiting Scholar

UC Berkeley

Aug 2016 – Feb 2016 California

Services

Conference Program Committee/Reviewer:

2022: AAAI, ICLR

2021: AAAI, EACL, EMNLP, ICLR, ICML, NAACL, NeuIPS, CCL

2020: AAAI, AACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, NeurIPS

2019: AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL

Collaborators

I am very lucky to collaborate with the following Research Interns and Co-Mentored Students:

Xinyu Wang (ShanghaiTech, 2019.10-Now): 10 papers published during internship, including ACL*4 , EMNLP*3 and NAACL*1 papers.
Jiong Cai (ShanghaiTech, 2020.10-Now): EMNLP 2017, SemEval 2022, EMNLP 2022
Chengyue Jiang (ShanghaiTech, 2021.8-Now): EMNLP 2022
Wei Liu (ShanghaiTech, 2022.7-Now)
Zixia Jia (ShanghaiTech, 2022.7-Now)
Chaoyi Ai (ShanghaiTech, 2022.7-Now)
Yinghui Li (THU, 2022.6-Now)
Yuchen Zhai (ZJU, 2022.1-Now)
Zeqi Tan (ZJU, 2022.5-Now)
Xiaoze Liu (ZJU, 2022.9-Now)
Xin Zhang (TJU, 2021.11-2022.4, 2022.11-): COLING 2022
Yupeng Zhang (BUAA, 2022.11-)
Xuming Hu (THU, 2021.8-2022.10)
Jinyuan Fang (SYSU, 2022.4-2022.10)
Zhichao Lin (TJU, 2022.5-2022.10)
Yu Zhang (SUDA, 2020.7-2021.3): COLING 2022
Zechuan Hu (ShanghaiTech, 2019.1-2021.7): 3 papers published, including 2 ACL papers and 1 EMNLP paper.
Yongliang Shen (ZJU, 2021.11-2022.3): SemEval 2022
Tao Ji (ECNU, 2020-2021): 2 EMNLP papers.
Xinyin Ma (ZJU, 2021): 1 EMNLP paper.
Jun Mei (ShanghaiTech, 2017-2018): AAAI 2018
Songlin Yang (ShanghaiTech, 2019-2020): COLING 2020
Yunzhe Yuan (ShanghaiTech, 2018-2019): AAAI 2019
Jun Li (ShanghaiTech, 2018-2019): ACL 2020

We are hiring research interns in Alibaba DAMO Academy. Please send me an email if you are interested!


I closely collaborate(d) with the following researchers:

Nguyen Bach, Wenjuan Han, Fei Huang, Zhongqiang Huang, Kewei Tu, Pengjun Xie.