Announcements

• Join us! Perspective students please read this.

Upcoming Travel

• September 24, 2020: Johns Hopkins
• Dec. 12, 2020: Neurips Wordplay workshop

Recent News

Sep 2020

• The PLUSLab and collaborators have 9 papers accepted to EMNLP 2020. 5 long papers to the main conference and 4 papers to the findings in 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!

Selected Recent Papers

• A complete list is in Google Scholar.

• Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, Emily Sheng, Kai-Wei Chang, Premkumar Natarajan, and Nanyun Peng, arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00268, 2020. 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 effortlessly like a Pro: A Style Transfer Approach for Simile Generation, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Smaranda Muresan, and Nanyun Peng, in 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
• TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions, Qiang Ning, Hao Wu, Rujun Han, Nanyun Peng, Matt Gardner, and Dan Roth, in the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 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
• 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), 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

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

Teaching

• Special Topic in Natural Language Generation (coming soon), UCLA (Fall 2020)
• CSCI 544: Applied Natural Language Processing, USC (Fall 2019).
• CSCI 544: Applied Natural Language Processing (with Jon May), USC (Fall 2018).