Welcome!

About Us

The UC Santa Barbara NLP group studies the theoretical foundation and practical algorithms for language technologies. We tackle challenging learning and reasoning problems under uncertainty, and pursue answers via studies of machine learning, deep learning, and interdisciplinary data science.

Broadly, we are interested in designing scalable inference and learning algorithms to analyze massive datasets with complex structures. In particular, our lab concentrates in the areas of information extraction, computational social science, knowledge graph, learning to reason, dialogue systems, language & vision, summarization, statistical relational learning, reinforcement learning, structure learning, and deep learning.

News

[03/21/2018] Our paper "Hate Lingo: A Target-based Linguistic Analysis of Hate Speech in Social Media" was accepted to ICWSM 2018. Congrats Mai and Vivek! Preprints will be released soon.

[03/17/2018] The NLP lab has received an Adobe Research Award for language and vision research. Thanks Adobe!

[03/03/2018] The Brookings Institution quoted our ACL 2017 paper on automated fake news detection [LINK].

[02/28/2018] We have two short papers accepted to NAACL-HLT 2018 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[02/26/2018] We are co-organizing SoCal NLP Symposium with Prof. Sameer Singh. Welcome to join us this April! Check the details [here].

[02/18/2018] Our paper "Video Captioning via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning" was accepted to CVPR 2018. Congrats Xin, Wenhu, and Jiawei! [PDF]

[02/14/2018] We are excited to share the news that 4 long papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the NAACL-HLT 2018 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[02/10/2018] Two tutorials accepted at major NLP conferences. Together with Jiwei Li (Stanford/Shannon.ai) and Xiaodong He (MSR), Prof. William Wang will present a tutorial on "Deep Reinforcement Learning for NLP" at ACL 2018. Together with Xiang Ren (USC) and Nanyun Peng (USC/ISI), Prof. William Wang will present a tutorial on Scalable Construction and Reasoning of Massive Knowledge Bases at NAACL-HLT 2018.

[12/18/2017] Congrats NLP Lab's undergraduate researcher Ke Ni for being named the honorable mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award 2018!

[11/22/2017] The NLP lab has received an unrestricted gift from Bytedance. Thanks Toutiao!

[11/06/2017] The NLP lab has received a Tencent AI Lab Rhino-Bird Award. Thanks Tencent!

[11/06/2017] Prof. William Wang recently discussed challenges on dialogue research with Wired [LINK] [PDF].

Recent Papers

• Look Before You Leap: Bridging Model-Free and Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Planned-Ahead Vision-and-Language Navigation Xin Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Hongmin Wang, William Yang Wang arXiv:1803.07729   [Paper]
• IcoRating: A Deep-Learning System for Scam ICO Identification Shuqing Bian, Zhenpeng Deng, Fei Li, Will Monroe, Peng Shi, Zijun Sun, Wei Wu, Sikuang Wang, William Yang Wang, Arianna Yuan, Tianwei Zhang, Jiwei Li arXiv:1803.03670   [Paper]
• Hate Lingo: A Target-based Linguistic Analysis of Hate Speech in Social Media Mai Elsherief, Vivek Kulkarni, Dana Nguyen, William Yang Wang, Elizabeth Belding ICWSM 2018   [Preprint coming soon]
• Video Captioning via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Xin Wang, Wenhu Chen, Jiawei Wu, Yuan-Fang Wang, William Yang Wang CVPR 2018   [Paper]   [Data]  
• Leveraging Intra-User and Inter-User Representation Learning for Automated Hate Speech Detection Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Elizabeth Belding, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2018   [Preprint coming soon]
• Watch, Listen, and Describe: Globally and Locally Aligned Cross-Modal Attentions for Video Captioning Xin Wang, Yuan-Fang Wang, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2018   [Preprint coming soon]
• Variational Knowledge Graph Reasoning Wenhu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Xifeng Yan, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2018   [Preprint coming soon]
• Reinforced Co-Training Jiawei Wu, Lei Li, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2018   [Preprint coming soon]
• Simple Models for Word Formation in Slang Vivek Kulkarni, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2018   [Preprint coming soon]
• KBGAN: Adversarial Learning for Knowledge Graph Embeddings Liwei Cai, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2018   [Paper]
• TFW, DamnGina, Juvie, and Hotsie-Totsie: On the Linguistic and Social Aspects of Internet Slang Vivek Kulkarni, William Yang Wang arXiv:1712.08291   [Paper]
• MOJITALK: Generating Emotional Responses at Scale Xianda Zhou, William Yang Wang arXiv:1711.04090   [Paper]