Nanyun (Violet) Peng
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
- November 17, 2023: SoCal NLP at UCLA
- November 21, 2023: Okawa Foundation award ceremony at SF
- December 4, 2023 -- December 10, 2023: EMNLP at Singapore
Recent News
Oct 2023
- The PLUSLab has ten papers accepted to EMNLP 2023; seven to the main conference and three to the findings.
Sep 2023
- Congrats Harold and Zi-Yi for their paper DesCo acceptence at Neurips 2023!
- Thrilled to receive the 2023 Okawa Foundation Research Grant. Thank Okawa Foundation for the generous support!
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
- Congrats I-Hung, for winning the Best Paper Award from the AAAI DLG 2022 workshop.
- The PLUSLab has six papers accepted to ACL 2022; four to the main conference and two to the findings.
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
- We compiled 24 handbooks for 24 timezones for the virtual AACL 2020. Enjoy! Credit to Derek Ma
- I will be an Remote Presentation Chair for AACL 2020.
Apr 2020
- Our paper R3 Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledge is accepted to ACL 2020.
Mar 2020
- I will serve as an Area Chair for the Information Extraction track at EMNLP 2020.
Feb 2020
- Giving an invited talk at CMU LTI.
Jan 2020
- Giving an invited talk at USC CS.
- Giving an invited talk at UCLA CS.
Nov 2019
- Our paper on evaluating open-domain dialog systems using predictive engagement is accepted to AAAI 2020.
- Checkout the slides for my keynote talk at EMNLP Neural Generation and Translation workshop!
- Checkout the slides for my keynote talk at EMNLP NewSum workshop!
Peng’s Language Understanding & Synthesis (PLUS) Lab
Selected Recent Papers
- You can also find my full publication list and my Google Scholar.
- AMPERE: AMR-Aware Prefix for Generation-Based Event Argument Extraction Model, I.-Hung Hsu*, Zhiyu Xie*, Kuan-Hao Huang, Premkumar Natarajan, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 61th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. Details
- Learning Action Conditions from Instructional Manuals for Instruction Understanding, Te-Lin Wu, Caiqi Zhang, Qingyuan Hu, Alex Spangher, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. Details
- ACCENT: An Automatic Event Commonsense Evaluation Metric for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems, Sarik Ghazarian*, Yijia Shao*, Rujun Han, Aram Galstyan, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 61th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. Details
- GENEVA: Benchmarking Generalizability for Event Argument Extraction with Hundreds of Event Types and Argument Roles, Tanmay Parekh, I.-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. Details
- Do Models Really Learn to Follow Instructions? An Empirical Study of Instruction Tuning, Po-Nien Kung and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 61th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), short, 2023. Details
- Unsupervised Melody-to-Lyric Generation, Yufei Tian, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Gunnar Sigurdsson, Chenyang Tao, Wenbo Zhao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 61th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. Details
- DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control, Kevin Yang, Dan Klein, Nanyun Peng, and Yuandong Tian, in Proceedings of the 61th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. Details
- Tractable Control for Autoregressive Language Generation, Honghua Zhang, Meihua Dang, Nanyun Peng, and Guy Van den Broeck, in Proceedings of the Fortieth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023. Details
- Generalized Decoding for Pixel, Image and Language, Xueyan Zou*, Zi-Yi Dou*, Jianwei Yang*, Zhe Gan, Linjie Li, Chunyuan Li, Xiyang Dai, Harkirat Behl, Jianfeng Wang, Lu Yuan, Nanyun Peng, Lijuan Wang, Yong Jae Lee, and Jianfeng Gao, in The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR-23), 2023. Details
- Character-Centric Story Visualization via Visual Planning and Token Alignment, Hong Chen, Rujun Han, Te-Lin Wu, Hideki Nakayama, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022. Details
- Context-Situated Pun Generation, Jiao Sun, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Shuyang Gao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Yang Liu, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022. Details
- Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision, Kevin Yang, Yuandong Tian, Nanyun Peng, and Dan Klein, in Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022. Details
- A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principles, Yufei Tian, Divyanshu Arun Sheth, and Nanyun Peng, in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (EMNLP-findings), 2022. Details
- InsNet: An Efficient, Flexible, and Performant Insertion-based Text Generation Model, Sidi Lu, Tao Meng, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022. Details
- Controllable Text Generation with Neurally-Decomposed Oracle, Tao Meng, Sidi Lu, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022. Details
- Controllable Text Generation for Open-Domain Creativity and Fairness, Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22), Early Career Track, 2022. Details
- NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Novel Document-Level Reasoning Challenge, Alexander Spangher, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022. Details
- Zero-Shot Sonnet Generation with Discourse-Level Planning and Aesthetics Features, Yufei Tian and Nanyun Peng, in 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022. Details
- Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts, Rujun Han, Hong Chen, Yufei Tian, and Nanyun Peng, in 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022. Details
- DEAM: Dialogue Coherence Evaluation using AMR-based Semantic Manipulations, Sarik Ghazarian, Nuan Wen, Aram Galstyan, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022. Details
- DEGREE: A Data-Efficient Generative Event Extraction Model, I.-Hung Hsu*, Kuan-Hao Huang*, Elizabeth Boschee, Scott Miller, Premkumar Natarajan, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL), 2022. Details
- Understanding Multimodal Procedural Knowledge by Sequencing Multimodal Instructional Manuals, Te-Lin Wu, Alex Spangher, Pegah Alipoormolabashi, Marjorie Freedman, Ralph Weischedel, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022. Details
- Document-level Entity-based Extraction as Template Generation, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Sam Tang, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021. Details
- AESOP: Paraphrase Generation with Adaptive Syntactic Control, Jiao Sun, Xuezhe Ma, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021. Details
- ESTER: A Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset for Event Semantic Relation Reasoning, Rujun Han, I.-Hung Hsu, Jiao Sun, Julia Baylon, Qiang Ning, Dan Roth, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021. Details
- Improving Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning via Robust Training, Kuan-Hao Huang, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021. Details
- Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia, Jiao Sun and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021. Details
- Societal Biases in Language Generation: Progress and Challenges, Emily Sheng, Kai-Wei Chang, Premkumar Natarajan, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021. Details
- Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings, Kevin Stowe, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Nanyun Peng, Smaranda Muresan, and Iryna Gurevych, in Proceedings of the Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021. Details
- COM2SENSE: A Commonsense Reasoning Benchmark with Complementary Sentences, Shikhar Singh, Nuan Wen, Yu Hou, Pegah Alipoormolabashi, Te-lin Wu, Xuezhe Ma, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of Findings of the Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-Findings), 2021. Details
- "Nice Try, Kiddo": Ad Hominems in Dialogue Systems, Emily Sheng, Kai-Wei Chang, Premkumar Natarajan, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2021. Details
- Plot-guided Adversarial Example Construction for Evaluating Open-domain Story Generation, Sarik Ghazarian, Zixi Liu, Akash S. M, Ralph Weischedel, Aram Galstyan, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2021. Details
- GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction, Wasi Ahmad, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21), 2021. Details
- Content Planning for Neural Story Generation with Aristotelian Rescoring, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Ralph Weischedel, and Nanyun Peng, in the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020. Details
- Generating similes
effortlesslylike a Pro: A Style Transfer Approach for Simile Generation, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Smaranda Muresan, and Nanyun Peng, in Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020. Details - Domain Knowledge Empowered Structured Neural Net for End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction, Rujun Han, Yichao Zhou, and Nanyun Peng, in the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020. Details
- Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, Emily Sheng, Kai-Wei Chang, Premkumar Natarajan, and Nanyun Peng, in the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)-Findings, long, 2020. Details
- Biomedical Event Extraction with Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mu Yang, and Nanyun Peng, in the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)-Findings, short, 2020. Details
- R3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledge, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Debanjan Ghosh, Smaranda Muresan, and Nanyun Peng, in the 2020 Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2020. Details
- Predictive Engagement: An Efficient Metric For Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems, Sarik Ghazarian, Ralph Weischedel, Aram Galstyan, and Nanyun Peng, in The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), 2020. Details
- Joint Event and Temporal Relation Extraction with Shared Representations and Structured Prediction, Rujun Han, Qiang Ning, and Nanyun Peng, in 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2019. Details
- The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation, Emily Sheng, Kai-Wei Chang, Premkumar Natarajan, and Nanyun Peng, in 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), short, 2019. Details
- Target Language-Aware Constrained Inference for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing, Tao Meng, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2019. Details
- Pun Generation with Surprise, He He, Nanyun Peng, and Percy Liang, in 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2019), 2019. Details
- On difficulties of cross-lingual transfer with order differences: A case study on dependency parsing, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Eduard Hovy, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2019. Details
- Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling, Lili Yao, Nanyun Peng, Weischedel Ralph, Kevin Knight, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan, in The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), 2019. Details
- Stack-pointer networks for dependency parsing, Xuezhe Ma, Zecong Hu, Jingzhou Liu, Nanyun Peng, Graham Neubig, and Eduard Hovy, in The 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), 2018. Details
- Style Transfer in Text: Exploration and Evaluation, Zhenxin Fu, Xiaoye Tan, Nanyun Peng, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan, in Proceedings of The Thirty-Second Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2018. Details
- Cross-sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs, Nanyun Peng, Hoifung Poon, Chris Quirk, Kristina Toutanova, and Wen-tau Yih, Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 2017. Details
- Improving named entity recognition for chinese social media with word segmentation representation learning, Nanyun Peng and Mark Dredze, in Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2016. Details
- Named entity recognition for chinese social media with jointly trained embeddings, Nanyun Peng and Mark Dredze, in Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2015. Details
- Dual decomposition inference for graphical models over strings, Nanyun Peng, Ryan Cotterell, and Jason Eisner, in Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2015. Details
About Me
Experience
- UCLA Computer Science
- Assistant Professor, 2020-present
- USC Computer Science
- Adjunct Research Assistant Professor, 2020-present
- Research Assistant Professor, 2018-2020
- USC Information Sciences Institute
- Research Affiliate, 2020-present
- Research Lead, 2019-2020
- Computer Scientist, 2017-2019
- Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, Computer Science 2017
- M.S. (Computer Science), B.S. (Computational Linguistics), B.S. (Econimics), Peking University 2012
Selected Awards and Recognitions
- Okawa Foundation Research Grant, 2023
- Google Research Scholar Award, 2023
- NAACL Outstanding Paper Award, 2022
- IJCAI Early Career Highlight, 2022
- AAAI DLG Best Paper Award, 2022
- Amazon Alexa AI Sponsored Research Award, 2022, 2023
- JPMorgan Outstanding Faculty Researcher Award, 2021
- EMNLP Outstanding Area Chair, 2019
- Fred Jelinek Fellowship, 2016
Teaching
- COMSCI 162: Natural Language Processing, UCLA (Winter 2023)
- COMSCI 188: Natural Language Processing, UCLA (Fall 2022)
- COMSCI 269: Special Topic in Natural Language Generation, UCLA (Spring 2022)
- COMSCI 188: Natural Language Processing, UCLA (Winter 2022)
- COMSCI 269: Special Topic in Natural Language Generation, UCLA (Fall 2020)
- CSCI 544: Applied Natural Language Processing, USC (Fall 2019).
- CSCI 544: Applied Natural Language Processing (with Jon May), USC (Fall 2018).