Lu Wei

Biography

I am interested in designing mathematical models and efficient machine learning algorithms for solving fundamental data processing problems, with a specific focus on natural language processing (NLP). I am particularly interested in natural language semantics (in a broad sense) and fundamental problems related to structured prediction. Prior to joining SUTD, I 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. Even earlier, I received my Bachelor’s degree (1st class) from School of Computing, National University of Singapore.

Highlights

• According to CSRankings, our StatNLP group is ranked 1st in Asia and 5th in the World on NLP in 2018 (with a score of 3.3).
• General chair: The 2018 Singapore Symposium on NLP (over 600 registered participants from industry, government and academia)
• EMNLP 2017 Tutorial on StatNLP Framework for Structured Prediction (our tutorial attracted 95 registered participants, and was one of the most popular tutorials)
• Area co-chairs: ACL 2016 , IJCNLP 2017, NLPCC 2017, EMNLP 2019
• Demonstrations co-chair: EMNLP 2018
• Publication co-chairs: ACL 2017, ACL 2018 (advisor)
• Standing reviewer team: TACL (2013-2020)
• Steering committee member: SemEval 2016, SemEval 2020
• SemEval 2018 Task 8 – SecureNLP
• Best Paper Award EMNLP 2011
• PC members/reviewers: ACL: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019; EMNLP: 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018; EACL: 2012, 2014, 2017; NAACL: 2016, 2018, 2019; CoNLL: 2012, 2018, 2019; NIPS: 2015, 2016, 2018; AISTATS: 2019; ICML: 2019; SIGIR: 2018, 2019; IJCAI: 2013, 2017, 2019 (Senior PC); AAAI: 2011, 2012 (Senior PC), 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 (Senior PC)

Selected Recent Publications

• Dependency-based Hybrid Trees for Semantic Parsing
  Zhanming Jie and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2018: the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Neural Segmental Hypergraphs for Overlapping Mention Recognition
  Bailin Wang and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2018: the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Better Transition-based AMR Parsing with a Refined Search Space
  Zhijiang Guo and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2018: the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Neural Adaptation Layers for Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition
  Bill Yuchen Lin and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2018: the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• A Neural Transition-based Model for Nested Mention Recognition
  Bailin Wang, Wei Lu, Yu Wang and Hongxia Jin
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2018: the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Learning with Structured Representations for Negation Scope Extraction
  Hao Li and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of ACL’2018: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Learning Cross-lingual Distributed Logical Representations for Semantic Parsing
  Yanyan Zou and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of ACL’2018: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Learning Latent Opinions for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification
  Bailin Wang and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of AAAI’2018: the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• cw2vec: Learning Chinese Word Embeddings with Stroke n-gram Information
  Shaosheng Cao, Wei Lu, Jun Zhou and Xiaolong Li
  Proceedings of AAAI’2018: the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Labeling Gaps Between Words: Recognizing Overlapping Mentions with Mention Separators
  Aldrian Obaja Muis and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2017: the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• A Simple Regularization-based Algorithm for Learning Cross-Domain Word Embeddings
  Wei Yang, Wei Lu and Vincent W. Zheng
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2017: the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• A Unified Framework for Structured Prediction: From Theory to Practice
  Wei Lu
  Proceedings of EMNLP’2017 (Tutorial Abstracts): the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• Topical Coherence in LDA-based Models through Induced Segmentation
  Hesam Amoualian, Wei Lu, Eric Gaussier, Massih R Amini, Georgios Balikas and Marianne Clausel
  Proceedings of ACL’2017: the 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Neural Architectures for Multilingual Semantic Parsing
  Raymond Hendy Susanto and Wei Lu
  Proceedings of ACL’2017: the 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• MalwareTextDB: A Database for Annotated Malware Articles
  Swee Kiat Lim, Aldrian Obaja Muis, Wei Lu and Chen Hui Ong
  Proceedings of ACL’2017: the 55th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Teaching

• 2019 Summer: 50.040: Natural Language Processing (Undergraduate)
• 2018 Fall: 50.570/51.504: Machine Learning (Graduate)
• 2018 Fall: 01.112: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
• 2018 Spring: 01.112: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
  Students’ Feedback
  
• 2017 Fall: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate)
  Students’ Feedback
  
• 2017 Fall: 01.112: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
  Students’ Feedback
  
• 2016 Fall: 50.007: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
  Students’ Feedback
• 2016 Spring: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate)
  Students’ Feedback
• 2015 Fall: 50.007: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
  Students’ Feedback
• 2015 Spring: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate)
  (no survey)
• 2014 Fall: 50.007: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
  Students’ Feedback
• 2014 Spring: 50.570: Machine Learning (Graduate)
  Students’ Feedback

Recent Research Grants

• Principal Investigator, Alibaba Innovative Research Program (2018-2019), US$100K
• Principal Investigator, MOE Tier 2 Grant (2018-2021). S$540K
• Principal Investigator, DSO Collaboration Grant (2017-2019). S$500K
• Principal Investigator, Defence Innovative Research Programme Project (TBA). S$890K
• Principal Investigator, MINDEF Grant – CISDeM T3 (2014-2018). S$610K

Group Members

• Hao Li (PhD student; from: National University of Singapore)
• Allan Jie (PhD student; from: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
• Thilini Cooray (PhD student; from: University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)
• Zhijiang Guo (PhD student; from: Sun Yat-sen University, China)
• Yanyan Zou (PhD student; from: Xiamen University, China)
• Yan Zhang (PhD student; from: Jilin University, China)
• Liying Cheng (PhD student; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
• Richard Sun (PhD student; from: National University of Defense Science and Technology, China)
• Lu Xu (PhD student; from: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Guoshun Nan (Research fellow; from: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China)
• Juan Cheng (Research fellow; from: National University of Singapore)
• Ke Shi (Research assistant; from: Nanyang Technological University)
• Rui Qiao (Research assistant; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
• Joel Ong (Research assistant; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
• Mayank Raj (Visiting fellow; from: Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India)
• Boyuan Zhuang (Visiting fellow; from: University of Science and Technology of China)
• Jing Liao (Visiting PhD student; from: Zhejiang University, China)

Group Alumni

• Jiaqi Pan (Visiting fellow; to: Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Leiming Du (Research assistant; from: Xi’an Jiao Tong University, China)
• Yu Jian Wu (Visiting student; from: Swarthmore College, USA)
• Anh Nguyen Tuan (Visiting fellow; from: Vietnam National University)
• Peter Phandi (Research assistant; from: National University of Singapore)
• Utkarsh Sinha (Visiting fellow; from: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India)
• Yiran Wang (Research officer; to: Columbia University, USA)
• Amila Silva (Research assistant; to: Singapore Management University)
• Hans Du (Visiting student; from: Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
• Bill Lin (Visiting student; to: University of Southern California, USA)
• Yinan Shao (Visiting student; from: Harbin Institute of Technology, China)
• Bailin Wang (Visiting student; to: University of Edinburgh, UK)
• Rachael Boyle (Visiting student; from: University of California, Berkeley, USA)
• Yaqi Xie (UROP; to: National University of Singapore)
• Siyuan Wang (UROP; to: Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Aldrian Obaja Muis (Research assistant; to: Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Raymond Hendy Susanto (Research assistant; from: National University of Singapore)
• Swee Kiat Lim (Reserach officer; from: National University of Singapore)
• Wei Yang (Visiting student; to: University of Waterloo, Canada)
• Hesam Amoualian (Visiting student; from: University of Grenoble Alpes, France)
• Shaosheng Cao (Research assistant; to: AI Department, Ant Financial Services Group/Alipay, China)
• Liling Tan (Research assistant; from: Saarland University, Germany)
• Moein Khajehnejad (Research officer; from: Sharif University of Technology, Iran)
• Jonathan Löfgren (Research officer; from: Uppsala University, Sweden)
• Bojia Qiu (Visiting 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, USA)
• Si Kai Lee (Research officer; to: Columbia University, USA)
• Sadegh Charmchi (Research officer; to: University of Alberta, Canada)
• Ruidan He (UROP; to: National University of Singapore)
• Cuong Xuan Chu (Research officer; to: Max Planck Institute, Germany)
• Lifei Chen (Research officer; to: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Sean Matthew English (Research officer; to: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute, Germany)

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

University Services

• Member, ISTD undergraduate committee: 2014-
• ISTD representative, University accreditation committee 2015-
• Member, Inbound exchange program: 2016-
• Member, Institutional review board: 2016-
• Member, Technology application elective committee: 2017-