Faculty

Biography

Dr. Lu is interested in designing novel scalable machine learning algorithms and mathematical models for intelligent processing of massive amounts of data in real time. His current focus is on text and language processing. He has extensive research experience on various topics in the field of statistical natural language processing and computational linguistics, such as semantic parsing, language generation, information extraction, machine translation, textual inference, and automatic text correction. He is particularly interested in designing statistical models for capturing the underlying semantics of natural language texts. His work on language generation from formal semantics has been recognized as the only best paper (out of over 600 submissions) at EMNLP’11, a top conference in the field of natural language processing.

Prior to joining SUTD, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a PhD student at the Singapore-MIT Alliance of the National University of Singapore.

News

• Publication Co-Chair: ACL2017
• Area Chair/Session Chair: ACL2016, EMNLP2015
• Steering Committee Member: SemEval 2016
• Member: TACL‘s standing reviewer team
• PC Member/Reviewer: EACL2017, AAAI2017, NIPS2016, AAAI2016, ACL2016, NAACL2016, EMNLP2016, ACL2015, *SEM2015, NIPS2015, EMNLP2015, EACL2014, ACL2014, EMNLP2014
• Grant Award: Defence Innovative Research Programme (DIRP), MINDEF, 2015
• Teaching
  • 2016 Spring: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate) Students’ Feedback
  • 2015 Fall: 50.007: Machine Learning (Undergraduate) Students’ Feedback

Group Members

• Hao Li (PhD student; from: National University of Singapore)
• Allan Jie (PhD student; from: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
• Liling Tan (Research assistant; from: Saarland University, Germany)
• Aldrian Obaja Muis (Research assistant; from: National University of Singapore)
• Raymond Hendy Susanto (Research assistant; from: National University of Singapore)
• Shaosheng Cao (Research assistant; from: Xidian University)
• Moein Khajehnejad (Research officer; from: Sharif University of Technology, Iran)
• Nipuna Ranasinghe (Research officer; from: University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka)
• Ramesh Pramuditha Rathnayake (Research officer; from: University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka)
• Kosala Herath (Research officer; from: University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka)
• Hesam Amoualian (Visiting PhD student; from: University of Grenoble Alpes, France)

Selected Publications

• A General Regularization Framework for Domain Adaptation
  Wei Lu, Hai Leong Chieu and Jonathan Löfgren
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2016: the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Learning to Capitalize with Character-Level Recurrent Neural Networks: An Empirical Study
  Raymond Hendy Susanto, Hai Leong Chieu and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2016: the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Learning to Recognize Discontiguous Entities
  Aldrian Obaja Muis and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2016: the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Weak Semi-Markov CRFs for Noun Phrase Chunking in Informal Text
  Aldrian Obaja Muis and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of NAACL’2016: the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
• Deep Neural Networks for Learning Graph Representations
  Shaosheng Cao, Wei Lu and Qiongkai Xu
  Proceedings of AAAI’2016: the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Joint Mention Extraction and Classification with Mention Hypergraphs
  Wei Lu and Dan Roth
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2015: the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Improving Semantic Parsing with Enriched Synchronous Context-Free Grammar
  Junhui Li, Muhua Zhu, Wei Lu and Guodong Zhou
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2015: the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• GraRep: Learning Graph Representations with Global Structural Information
  Shaosheng Cao, Wei Lu and Qiongkai Xu
  Proceedings of CIKM’2015: the 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
• Constrained Semantic Forests for Improved Discriminative Semantic Parsing
  Wei Lu
  Proceedings of ACL’2015: the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Semantic Parsing with Relaxed Hybrid Trees
  Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2014: the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Multilingual Semantic Parsing: Parsing Multiple Languages into Semantic Representations
  Zhanming Jie and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of COLING’2014: the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
• Automatic Event Extraction with Structured Preference Modeling
  Wei Lu and Dan Roth
  Proceedings of ACL’2012: the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Joint Inference for Event Timeline Construction
  Quang Do, Wei Lu, and Dan Roth
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2012: the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning
• A Probabilistic Forest-to-String Model for Language Generation from Typed Lambda Calculus Expressions
  Wei Lu and Hwee Tou Ng
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2011: the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Better Punctuation Prediction with Dynamic Conditional Random Fields
  Wei Lu and Hwee Tou Ng
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2010: the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Natural Language Generation with Tree Conditional Random Fields
  Wei Lu, Hwee Tou Ng and Wee Sun Lee
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2009: the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• A Generative Model for Parsing Natural Language to Meaning Representations
  Wei Lu, Hwee Tou Ng, Wee Sun Lee and Luke S. Zettlemoyer
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2008: the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Honours & Awards

• Best Paper Award, the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’11), 2011
• Dean’s Graduate Research Excellence Award, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 2009-2010
• Research Achievement Award, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 2008-2009
• President’s Fellowship, National University of Singapore, 2006-2007
• Singapore-MIT Alliance Scholarship, 2005-2006, 2006-2009
• Dean’s List, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 2001-2005
• Singapore MOE Undergraduate Scholarship, 2000-2005
• 1st Prize (Full credits: 140/140), National Mathematical Olympiad Competition, China, 1996
• 1st Prize, National Mathematical Olympiad Competition, China, 1995

Research Collaborations

• Dan Roth (Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Hai Leong Chieu (Principal Member of Technical Staff, DSO National Laboratories, Singapore)
• Preslav Nakov (Senior Researcher, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
• Nan Liu (Principal Research Scientist, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore)
• Daniel Dahlmeier (Research Lead, SAP Research, Singapore)

Education

• PhD, Computer Science, 2009, Singapore-MIT Alliance, National University of Singapore
• M.Sc, Computer Science, 2006, Singapore-MIT Alliance, National University of Singapore
• B.Comp (1st-Class Honors), Computer Science, 2005, National University of Singapore

Professional Experience

• Postdoctoral Research Associate, Oct 2011 – Jun 2013
  Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Research Fellow, Aug 2009 – Sep 2011
  School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Visiting Research Student, Sep 2007 – May 2008
  CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Past Teaching

• 2015 Spring: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate) No Survey Conducted
• 2014 Fall: 50.007: Machine Learning (Undergraduate) Students’ Feedback
• 2014 Spring: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate) Students’ Feedback

Group Alumni

• Jonathan Löfgren (Research officer; from: Uppsala University)
• Bojia Qiu (Visiting UG student; from: Zhejiang University (Chu Kochen Honors College))
• Wenqiang Xu (Research officer; from: University of Science and Technology of China (Special Class for the Gifted Young))
• Tu Thanh Vu (Research officer; to: University of Massachusetts Amherst)
• Si Kai Lee (Research officer; to: Columbia University)
• Sadegh Charmchi (Research officer; to: University of Alberta)
• Ruidan He (UROP; to: National University of Singapore)
• Cuong Xuan Chu (Research officer; to: Max Planck Institute)
• Lifei Chen (Research officer; to: Carnegie Mellon University)
• Sean Matthew English (Research officer; to: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute)