Associate Professor & Associate Head of Pillar
Website: http://statnlp.org/
Telephone: +65 6499 4784
Office #: 1.302-10
Pillar / Cluster: Design and Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems Technology and Design
Research Areas:: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence, Data Science

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 4th in the World on NLP in 2017-2019 (with a score of 9.3)
- Co-organizer & Speaker: 2019 AI Summer School
- 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 at that time)
- Area co-chairs: ACL 2016 , IJCNLP 2017, EMNLP 2019, ACL 2020, COLING 2020, AACL2020, ACML2020, IJCAI2021, NAACL2021, ACL2021
- Demonstrations co-chair: EMNLP 2018
- Publication co-chairs: ACL 2017, ACL 2018 (advisor)
- Action Editor: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2020-2022)
- Action Editor: Computational Linguistics (2020-2022)
- Steering committee member: SemEval 2016, SemEval 2020, SemEval 2021
- 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. 2020; EACL: 2012, 2014, 2017, 2021; NAACL: 2016, 2018, 2019; CoNLL: 2012, 2018, 2019; NIPS: 2015, 2016, 2018; AISTATS: 2019, 2020, 2021; ICML: 2019; SIGIR: 2018, 2019; IJCAI: 2013, 2017, 2019 (Senior PC), 2020 (Senior PC); AAAI: 2011, 2012 (Senior PC), 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 (Senior PC), 2020, 2021 (Senior PC)
Selected Recent Publications
- Understanding Attention for Text Classification
Xiaobing Sun and Wei Lu
ACL’2020: the 57th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction
Guoshun Nan, Zhijiang Guo, Ivan Sekulić and Wei Lu
ACL’2020: the 57th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Attention-based Context Aware Reasoning for Situation Recognition
Thilini Cooray, Ngai-Man Cheung and Wei Lu
CVPR’2020: the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition - Learning Latent Forests for Medical Relation Extraction
Zhijiang Guo, Guoshun Nan, Wei Lu and Shay B. Cohen
IJCAI’2020: the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. - Knowing What, How and Why: a Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Haiyun Peng, Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, Fei Huang, Wei Lu, and Luo Si
AAAI’2020: the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. - Learning Explicit and Implicit Structures for Targeted Sentiment Analysis
Hao Li and Wei Lu
EMNLP’2019: the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Text2Math: End-to-end Parsing Text into Math Expressions
Yanyan Zou and Wei Lu
EMNLP’2019: the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Dependency-Guided LSTM-CRF for Named Entity Recognition
Zhanming Jie and Wei Lu
EMNLP’2019: the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Combining Spans into Entities: A Neural Two-Stage Approach for Recognizing Discontiguous Entities
Bailin Wang and Wei Lu
EMNLP’2019: the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Aligning Cross-lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information
Hsiu-Wei Yang, Yanyan Zou, Peng Shi, Wei Lu, Jimmy Lin and Xu Sun
EMNLP’2019: the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Densely Connected Graph Convolutional Networks for Graph-to-Sequence Learning
Zhijiang Guo, Yan Zhang, Zhiyang Teng and Wei Lu
TACL: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Attention Guided Graph Convolutional Networks for Relation Extraction
Zhijiang Guo, Yan Zhang and Wei Lu
ACL’2019: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - A Neural Multi-digraph Model for Chinese NER with Gazetteers
Ruixue Ding, Pengjun Xie, Xiaoyan Zhang, Wei Lu, Linlin Li and Luo Si
ACL’2019: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Twitter Homophily: Network Based Prediction of User’s Occupation
Jiaqi Pan, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Wei Lu, Hai Leong Chieu, Xinghao Pan and Ni Yi Puay
ACL’2019: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Quantity Tagger: A Latent-Variable Sequence Labeling Approach to Solving Addition-Subtraction Word Problems
Yanyan Zou and Wei Lu
ACL’2019: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Neural Chinese Address Parsing
Hao Li, Wei Lu, Pengjun Xie and Linlin Li
NAACL’2019: the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Joint Detection and Location of English Puns
Yanyan Zou and Wei Lu
NAACL’2019: the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Better Modeling of Incomplete Annotations for Named Entity Recognition
Zhanming Jie, Pengjun Xie, Wei Lu, Ruixue Ding and Linlin Li
NAACL’2019: the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Dependency-based Hybrid Trees for Semantic Parsing
Zhanming Jie and Wei Lu
EMNLP’2018: the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Neural Segmental Hypergraphs for Overlapping Mention Recognition
Bailin Wang and Wei Lu
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
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
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
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
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
ACL’2018: the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Group Members
- Thilini Cooray (PhD student; co-supervised with Ngai-Man Cheung)
- Liying Cheng (PhD student; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design; Alibaba Talent Program)
- Richard Sun (PhD student; from: National University of Defense Science and Technology, China)
- Lu Xu (PhD student; from: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Alibaba Talent Program)
- Haoran Li (PhD student; from: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)
- Joel Ong (PhD student; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
- Perry Lam (PhD student; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
- Qi Zhang (PhD student; from: Zhejiang University, China)
- Yuxiang Zhou (Visiting PhD student; from: Beijing Institute of Technology, China)
- Jiale Han (Visiting PhD student; from: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China)
- Guoshun Nan (Research fellow; from: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China)
- Tianduo Wang (Research assistant; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
- Jierui Li (Research assistant; from: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)
- Steven Wang (Visiting fellow; from: Zhejiang University, China)
- Guoqing Luo (Visiting fellow; from: Wuhan University, China)
- Jiaqi Zeng (Visiting fellow; from: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)
- Xiaobao Wu (Visiting fellow; from: Tsinghua University, China)
- Ankit Garg (Visiting fellow; from: Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India)
- Yao Xiao (Visiting fellow; from: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)
- Guangtao Zeng (Visiting fellow; from: Sun Yat-Sen University, China)
- Sicong Leng (UROP; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
- Jiaxi Li (UROP; from: Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Group Alumni (PhD Students)
- Zhijiang Guo
To: University of Cambridge
Internship: University of Edinburgh - Yanyan Zou
To: Tencent AI Lab
Internship: Microsoft Research Asia - Hao Li
To: ByteDance AI Singapore
Internship: Alibaba DAMO - Allan Jie
To: ByteDance AI Singapore
Internship: Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Group Alumni (Others)
- Rui Qiao (Research assistant; to: National University of Singapore)
- Jue Wang (Visiting fellow; from: Zhejiang University, China)
- Xingce Bao (Visiting fellow; from: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
- Ivan Sekulić (Visiting fellow; from: Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany)
- Jack Wu (Visiting fellow; from: York University, Canada)
- Jieyu Chen (Visiting fellow; to: Cornell University, USA)
- Boyuan Zhuang (Research assistant; from: University of Science and Technology of China)
- Jing Liao (Visiting student; from: Zhejiang University, China)
- Ke Shi (Research assistant; to: A*STAR AI, Singapore)
- Jiaqi Pan (Visiting fellow; to: Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
- Rishabh Bhardwaj (Visiting student; to: National University of Singapore)
- Leiming Du (Research assistant; to: Huawei, China)
- Yu Jian Wu (Visiting student; to: Columbia University, 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)
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
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
Teaching
- 2020 Summer: 50.040: Natural Language Processing (Undergraduate)
Students’ Feedback - 2019 Fall: 01.112: Machine Learning (Undergraduate)
Students’ Feedback - 2019 Summer: 50.040: Natural Language Processing (Undergraduate)
Students’ Feedback - 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
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-
I am looking for strong candidates for the following positions: Postdoctoral researchers, Research assistants, Visiting students, UG researchers, Programmers and PhD students. Drop me an email if you are interested.
My current CV (updated Sep 2019)