I’m a researcher at the Allen Institute for AI on the Semantic Scholar Research team. Before that, I was a statistician in Seattle and a researcher at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. I graduated in 2015 with an MS in Statistics from the University of Washington.

My research interests

I work on NLP problems motivated by challenges in building applications to help scholars with their research. I’m currently mainly interested in:

• Language modeling for scientific text
• ✨Summarization of scientific papers
• ✨Fact checking claims using the broader scientific literature
• Corpora and resources to support other researchers interested in this problem space
• ✨Augmented reading of scientific papers to support definitions and note-taking

and I’ve also done some work in:

• Generation
• Explainable AI
• Information extraction
• ✨Scientometrics and Science of science

Language modeling

• Don’t Stop Pretraining 🎶 (code) (ACL 2020 paper) - 🎉 Runner-up for Best Paper
  • ACL 2020 talk (11 min) by Suchin
  • video (15 min) by Henry AI Labs
• SciBERT (code) (EMNLP 2019 paper)

Summarization

• ✨ TLDR: Extreme summarization of scientific documents (demo) (code/download) (Findings of EMNLP 2020 paper)
  • ✨ See live in production on Semantic Scholar
  • video (12 min) by Henry AI Labs
  • In the news: Nature, MIT Tech Review, TNW

Fact checking

• ✨ SciFact: Scientific claim verification (demo) (code/download) (EMNLP 2020 paper)
  • In the news: MIT Tech Review, VentureBeat, ZDNet

Corpora and resources

• S2ORC: The Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus (download) (ACL 2020 paper)
  • ACL 2020 talk (12 min)
• CORD-19: The COVID-19 Open Research Corpus (download)(NLP-COVID at ACL 2020 paper) (OpenReview)
  • SIIRH 2020 at ECIR 2020 keynote (18 min) (April 14, 2020)
  • NY-NLP meetup talk (30 min) (April 27, 2020)
  • AWS Education: Research Seminar talk (60 min) (July 29, 2020)
  • In the news: White House OSTP, Science, Nature, TechCrunch, Geekwire [1] [2]

Augmented Reading

• ✨ ScholarPhi: Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols (arXiv preprint; 2020; under submission)

Generation

• Citation text generation (arXiv preprint; 2020; under submission)

Explainable AI

• Explanation-based tuning of opaque machine learners (arXiv preprint; 2020; under submission)

Information extraction

• Document-Level definition detection in scholarly documents (SDP at EMNLP 2020)
• Combining distant and direct supervision for neural relation extraction (NAACL 2019)
• Construction of the literature graph in Semantic Scholar (NAACL 2018)

Scientometrics and Science of science

• ✨ Text mining approaches for dealing with the rapidly expanding literature on COVID-19 (Briefings in Bioinformatics 2020)
• Quantifying sex bias in clinical trial participation (JAMA 2019)
  • In the news: Quartz article
• Citation count analysis for papers with preprints (arXiv preprint; 2018)

Shared tasks

• SciVer at SDP 2021 (NAACL 2021) - Scientific fact checking (link)
• EPIC-QA at TAC 2020 - Open domain question answering challenge: Can systems handle a mixture of questions from experts as well as consumers? (link)
• TREC-COVID at TREC 2020 - Information retrieval challenge over an evolving CORD-19 corpus (link) (JAMIA 2020 paper) (SIGIR Forum 2020 paper)

Workshops

• The 2nd SDP workshop will be at NAACL 2021! Stay tuned! (link)

• 1st SciNLP workshop at AKBC 2020 (link) (recorded talks) - What a success! 166 of 422 AKBC attendees signed up for our workshop! Stay tuned for the next one ;)

My collaborators

All of my projects have been collaborations with other awesome researchers ❤️. Many thanks to:

Waleed Ammar (Google), Iz Beltagy (AI2), Isabel Cachola (JHU), Arman Cohan (AI2), Doug Downey (AI2/Northwestern), Sergey Feldman (AI2), Suchin Gururangan (UW/AI2), Andrew Head (UC Berkeley), Dongyeop Kang (UC Berkeley), Rodney Kinney (AI2), Ben Lee (UW), Ana Marasović (UW/AI2), Mark Neumann (AI2), Swabha Swayamdipta (UW/AI2), Dave Wadden (UW), Lucy Lu Wang (AI2).