image-title-here

Nanyun (Violet) Peng

  • Assistant Professor @ UCLA CS
  • violetpeng AT cs DOT ucla DOT edu
  • UCLA Eng VI Rm 397A
  • Natural Language Processing
    Machine Learning

Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles. My research goals aim to build robust and generalizable Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that lower the communication barriers and enable AI agents to become companions for humans. With these goals in mind, I have been focusing on several research topics, including creative language generation, low-resource information extraction, and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. I got my PhD in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, after that, I spent three awesome years at University of Southern California as a Research Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, and a Research Lead at the Information Sciences Institute. I have backgrounds in Linguistics and Economics and held BAs in both.

News

Announcements

  • Join us! Prospective students please read this.

Upcoming Travel

Recent News

Mar 2024

  • The PLUSLab has six papers accepted to NAACL 2024; fix to the main conference and one to the findings.

Feb 2024

  • Congratulations, Masoud, for his paper on Pre-training medical multimodal models accepted to LREC-COLING 2024.

Jan 2024

  • Congratulations, Kevin, for his paper on reinforcement learning with contrastive distillation accepted to ICLR 2024.
  • Congratulations, Derek, for his paper on data-augmentation for event extraction accepted to AAAI 2024; and another on event-empowered information pathway accetped to AAAI 2024 system demonstration track.

Oct 2023

  • The PLUSLab has ten papers accepted to EMNLP 2023; seven to the main conference and three to the findings.

Sep 2023

May 2023

  • Congrats Honghua and Meihua for their paper Gelato acceptence at ICML 2023!
  • Thrilled to receive the 2023 Google Research Scholar. Thank Google for the generous support!
  • The PLUSLab has twelve papers accepted to ACL 2023; eleven to the main conference and one to the findings.

Oct 2022

  • Our NADO paper is selected as an Oral paper at Neurips 2022!
  • The PLUSLab has eight papers accepted to EMNLP 2022; four to the main conference and four to the findings.

Sep 2022

  • Congrats Sidi and Zi-Yi, for their papers accepted to Neurips 2022!
  • Congrats Zi-Yi, for winning an Amazon-UCLA PhD Fellowship!

Aug 2022

  • Congrats Jiao, for winning an Amazon-USC PhD Fellowship!

Jun 2022

  • Congrats Alex, for winning the Outstanding Paper Award from NAACL 2022.
  • We receive a funding from DARPA to work on learning information pathway. Thank DARPA for the generous support!
  • I will serve as an Area Chair for AAAI 2022.

May 2022

  • I will serve as an Area Chair for EMNLP 2022.

Apr 2022

  • I am invited to give an Early Career Spotlight Talk at IJCAI 2022.
  • I will serve as a Senior Area Chair for AACL 2022.
  • The PLUSLab has seven papers accepted to NAACL 2022 main conference.

Mar 2022

  • Congrats Zi-Yi, for his paper acceptance to CVPR 2022.

Feb 2022

Jan 2022

  • Thank Amazon Alexa AI for the generous gift to fund our research on Creative Generation.
  • Thank Cisco for the faculty award to fund our research on Generative Models for Information Extraction tasks.

Dec 2021

  • The PLUSLab has a paper accepted to AAAI 2022 as oral presentation, and a paper to AAAI Deep Learning on Graphs DLG-AAAI 2022 workshop.
  • I will serve as an action editor for ARR January 2022 and NAACL 2022.

Sep 2021

  • I will serve as an action editor for ARR November 2021 and ACL 2022.

Aug 2021

  • The PLUSLab has nine papers accepted to EMNLP 2021; seven to the main conference and two to the findings of ACL.

Jul 2021

  • I will serve as a Publicity Chair for NAACL 2022!
  • Thank JPMorgan for the Outstanding Faculty Researcher Award!

Jun 2021

  • I will serve as a Workshop Chair for IJCAI 2022!

May 2021

  • The PLUSLab has four papers accepted to ACL 2021; Three to the main conference and one to the findings of ACL.
  • I will give an invited talk at NAACL 2021 Narrative Understanding workshop!

Apr 2021

  • I will give an invited talk at Google Research!
  • I will give an invited talk at Microsoft Research!

Mar 2021

  • The PLUSLab has three long papers accepted to NAACL 2021.

Jan 2021

  • The PLUSLab has a long paper accepted to EACL 2021.

Dec 2020

  • The PLUSLab has 2 papers accepted to AAAI 2021.

Oct 2020

  • I will give an invited talk at IBM Research!
  • I will serve as a Area Chair (AC) of the Machine Learning Track for ACL 2021.
  • I will serve as a Senior Area Chair (SAC) of the Generation Track for NAACL 2021.

Sep 2020

  • I will give an invited talk at Amazon!
  • The PLUSLab has 9 papers accepted to EMNLP 2020. 5 long papers to the main conference and 4 papers to the findings of EMNLP.

Aug 2020

  • I will serve as an Area Chair for AAAI 2021.

Jun 2020

Apr 2020

Mar 2020

  • I will serve as an Area Chair for the Information Extraction track at EMNLP 2020.

Feb 2020

Jan 2020

  • Giving an invited talk at USC CS.
  • Giving an invited talk at UCLA CS.

Nov 2019


Peng’s Language Understanding & Synthesis (PLUS) Lab

Selected Recent Papers


About Me

Experience

Selected Awards and Recognitions

Teaching