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

[03/10/2021] We are excited to share the news that 8 papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the EACL, NAACL, and ICLR 2021 conferences! Preprints will be released soon.

[09/21/2020] We are excited to share the news that 8 papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the EMNLP 2020 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[12/26/2019] Congratulations Wenhu Chen and Wenhan Xiong for their accepted ICLR 2020 papers!

[06/24/2019] Congratultions to Xin Wang on winning the CVPR 2019 Best Student Paper Award.

[05/25/2019] The NLP Group has received a new Google gift to work on language and vision research. Thanks Google!

[05/15/2019] We are excited to share the news that 7 long papers and 1 short paper from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the ACL 2019 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[03/15/2019] The NLP lab has received a Google Faculty Research Award. Thanks Google!

[03/05/2019] Congrats Xin for his accepted CVPR 2019 oral paper on vision-language navigation with Microsoft Research collaborators!

[02/22/2019] We are excited to share the news that 6 papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the NAACL-HLT 2019 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[11/06/2018] The NLP lab has received a Tencent AI Lab Rhino-Bird Gift Fund. Thanks Tencent!

[11/06/2018] The NLP lab has received two faculty research grants from Intel AI. Thanks Intel!

[11/01/2018] We are excited to share the news that 2 papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the AAAI 2019 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[08/27/2018] The NLP lab has received a new IBM Faculty Award (2018). Thanks IBM!

[08/24/2018] Prof. William Wang received prestigious 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award!

[08/10/2018] We are excited to share the news that 4 long papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the EMNLP 2018 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[07/03/2018] Our paper "Look Before You Leap: Bridging Model-Free and Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Planned-Ahead Vision-and-Language Navigation" was accepted to ECCV 2018. Congrats Xin, Wenhan, and Hongmin!

[06/24/2018] The NLP lab has received an Amazon AWS Grant for Research. Thanks AWS!

[05/24/2018] The NLP lab has received a Facebook Research Award to work on low-resource machine translation and comparable corpora mining. Thanks Facebook!

[04/20/2018] We are excited to share the news that 5 long papers from UCSB NLP group were accepted to the ACL 2018 conference! Preprints will be released soon.

[04/16/2018] Our paper "Scheduled Policy Optimization for Natural Language Communication with Intelligent Agents" was accepted to IJCAI-ECAI 2018. Congrats Wenhan! Preprints will be released soon.

[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 and Wenhu! [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

• Unsupervised Multi-hop Question Answering by Question Generation Liangming Pan, Wenhu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Min-Yen Kan and William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2021, Long Paper, ACL.
• Semi-Supervised Policy Initialization for Playing Games with Language Hints Tsu-Jui Fu and William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2021, Short Paper, ACL.
• Open Question Answering over Tables and Text Wenhu Chen, Ming-Wei Chang, Eva Schlinger, William Yang Wang, William Cohen ICLR 2021, Full Paper, ICLR.
• Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval Wenhan Xiong, Xiang Lorraine Li, Srini Iyer, Jingfei Du, Patrick Lewis, William Yang Wang, Yashar Mehdad, Wen-tau Yih, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela, Barlas Oguz ICLR 2021, Full Paper, ICLR.
• Progressively Pretrained Dense Corpus Index for Open-Domain Question Answering Wenhan Xiong, Hong Wang and William Yang Wang EACL 2021, Long Paper, ACL.
• On Hallucination and Predictive Uncertainty in Conditional Language Generation Yijun Xiao and William Yang Wang EACL 2021, Long Paper, ACL.
• L2C: Describing Visual Differences Needs Semantic Understanding of Individuals An Yan, Xin Wang, Tsu-Jui Fu and William Yang Wang EACL 2021, Short Paper, ACL.
• Multimodal Text Style Transfer for Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation Wanrong Zhu, Xin Wang, Tsu-Jui Fu, An Yan, Pradyumna Narayana, Kazoo Sone, Sugato Basu and William Yang Wang EACL 2021, Long Paper, ACL.
• HULK: An Energy Efficiency Benchmark Platform for Responsible Natural Language Processing Xiyou Zhou, Zhiyu Chen, Xiaoyong Jin and William Yang Wang EACL 2021, Demo Paper, ACL.
• Meta Module Network for Compositional Visual Reasoning Wenhu Chen, Zhe Gan, Linjie Li, Yu Cheng, William Yang Wang, Jingjing Liu WACV 2021, Oral Paper, IEEE/CVF. Best Student Paper Award Honorable Mention.
• Investigating African-American Vernacular English in Transformer-Based Text Generation Sophie Groenwold, Lily Ou, Aesha Parekh, Samhita Honnavalli, Sharon Levy, Diba Mirza and William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Short Paper, ACL.
• KGLM: Pretrained Knowledge-Grounded Language Model for Data-to-Text Generation Wenhu Chen, Yu Su, Xifeng Yan and William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Long Paper, ACL.
• Towards Understanding Sample Variance in Visually Grounded Language Generation: Evaluations and Observations Wanrong Zhu, Xin Wang, Pradyumna Narayana, Kazoo Sone, Sugato Basu, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Short Paper, ACL.
• Iterative Language-Based Image Editing via Self-Supervised Counterfactual Reasoning Tsu-Jui Fu, Xin Wang, Scott Grafton, Miguel Eckstein, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Long Paper, ACL.
• Counterfactual Off-Policy Training for Neural Dialogue Generation Qingfu Zhu, Wei-Nan Zhang, Ting Liu and William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Long Paper, ACL.
• Logic2Text: High-Fidelity Natural Language Generation from Logical Forms Zhiyu Chen, Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Xiyou Zhou, Yunkai Zhang, Sairam Sundaresan, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Findings of EMNLP, ACL.
• HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Zhiyu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Hong Wang, William Wang EMNLP 2020, Findings of EMNLP, ACL.
• Learning to Stop: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Urban Vision-Language Navigation Jiannan Xiang, Xin Wang and William Yang Wang EMNLP 2020, Findings of EMNLP, ACL.
• Counterfactual Vision-and-Language Navigation via Adversarial Path Sampler Tsu-Jui Fu, Xin Wang, Matthew F Peterson, Scott T. Grafton, Miguel Eckstein, William Yang Wang ECCV 2020, Spotlight Paper: Top 5% out of 5025 submissions
• Environment-agnostic Multitask Learning for Natural Language Grounded Navigation Xin Wang, Vihan Jain, Eugene Ie, William Yang Wang, Zornitsa Kozareva, Sujith Ravi ECCV 2020
• SafeRoute: Learning to Navigate Streets Safely in an Urban Environment Sharon Levy, Wenhan Xiong, Elizabeth Belding, and William Yang Wang ACM TIST
• Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables Wenhu Chen, Jianshu Chen, Yu Su, Zhiyu Chen and William Yang Wang ACL 2020
• Couple-VAE: Mitigating the Encoder-Decoder Incompatibility in Variational Text Modeling with Coupled Deterministic Networks Chen Wu, Prince Zizhuang Wang, William Yang Wang ACL 2020
• Towards Understanding Gender Bias in Relation Extraction Andrew Gaut, Tony Sun, Shirlyn Tang, Yuxin Huang, Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Jieyu Zhao, Diba Mirza, Elizabeth Belding, Kai-Wei Chang, William Yang Wang ACL 2020
• Few-Shot NLG with Pre-Trained Language Model Zhiyu Chen, Harini Eavani, Wenhu Chen, Yinyin Liu, William Yang Wang ACL 2020
• Vision-Language Navigation Policy Learning and Adaptation Xin Wang, Qiuyuan Huang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jianfeng Gao, Dinghan Shen, Yuan-Fang Wang, William Yang Wang, Lei Zhang TPAMI
• REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments Yuankai Qi, Qi Wu, Peter Anderson, Xin Wang, William Yang Wang, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel CVPR 2020 [PDF]  
• Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning of Transferable Meta-Skills for Embodied Navigation Juncheng Li, Xin Wang, Siliang Tang, Haizhou Shi, Fei Wu, Yueting Zhuang, William Yang Wang CVPR 2020 [PDF]  
• Fakeddit: A New Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Fake News Detection Kai Nakamura, Sharon Levy, William Yang Wang LREC 2020 [PDF]  
• A Survey on Natural Language Processing for Fake News Detection Ray Oshikawa, Jing Qian, William Yang Wang LREC 2020 [PDF]  
• Pretrained Encyclopedia: Weakly Supervised Knowledge-Pretrained Language Model Wenhan Xiong, Jingfei Du, William Yang Wang, Veselin Stoyanov ICLR 2020 [PDF]  
• TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification Wenhu Chen, Hongmin Wang, Jianshu Chen, Yunkai Zhang, Hong Wang, Shiyang Li, Xiyou Zhou, William Yang Wang ICLR 2020 [PDF]  
• Generative Adversarial Zero-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs Pengda Qin, Xin Wang, Wenhu Chen, Chunyun Zhang, Weiran Xu, William Yang Wang AAAI 2020   [Preprint coming soon]  
• Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Disfluency Detection Shaolei Wang, Wanxiang Che, Qi Liu, Pengda Qin, Ting Liu, William Yang Wang AAAI 2020   [Preprint coming soon]  
• Neural Gaussian Copula for Variational Autoencoder Prince Zizhuang Wang, William Yang Wang EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019   [PDF]   [BIB]  
• Deep Reinforcement Learning with Distributional Semantic Rewards for Abstractive Summarization Siyao Li, Deren Lei, Pengda Qin, William Yang Wang EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019   [PDF]   [BIB]  
• A Benchmark Dataset for Learning to Intervene in Online Hate Speech Jing Qian, Anna Bethke, Yinyin Liu, Elizabeth Belding, William Yang Wang EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019   [PDF]   [BIB]  
• VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research Xin Wang, Jiawei Wu, Junkun Chen, Lei Li, Yuan-Fang Wang, William Yang Wang ICCV 2019 [PDF]   [BIB]   [WEBSITE]  
• Semantically Conditioned Dialog Response Generation via Hierarchical Disentangled Self-Attention Wenhu Chen, Jianshu Chen, Pengda Qin, Xifeng Yan, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Paper]  
• Improving Question Answering over Incomplete KBs with Knowledge-Aware Reader Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Paper]  
• TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Preprint coming soon]  
• What Should I Ask? Using Conversationally Informative Rewards for Goal-Oriented Visual Dialog Pushkar shukla, Carlos Elmadjian, Richika Sharan, Vivek Kulkarni, Matthew Turk, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Preprint coming soon]  
• Self-Supervised Learning for Contextualized Extractive Summarization Hong Wang, Xin Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Paper]  
• Towards Explainable NLP: A Generative Explanation Framework for Text Classification Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Paper]  
• Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review Tony Sun, Andrew Gaut, Shirlyn Tang, Yuxin Huang, Mai ElSherief, Jieyu Zhao, Diba Mirza, Elizabeth Belding, Kai-Wei Chang, William Yang Wang ACL 2019   [Paper]  
• Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation Xin Wang, Qiuyuan Huang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jianfeng Gao, Dinghan Shen, Yuan-Fang Wang, William Yang Wang, Lei Zhang CVPR 2019   [Paper]   *Best Student Paper Award  
• Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction Hong Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2019   [Paper]  
• Riemannian Normalizing Flow on Variational Wasserstein Autoencoder for Text Modeling Prince Zizhuang Wang, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2019   [Paper]  
• Imposing Label-Relational Inductive Bias for Extremely Fine-Grained Entity Typing Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Deren Lei, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2019   [Paper]  
• Learning to Decipher Hate Symbols Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Elizabeth Belding, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2019   [Paper]  
• How Large A Vocabulary Does Text Classification Need? A Variational Approach on Vocabulary Selection Wenhu Chen, Yu Su, Yilin Shen, Zhiyu Chen, Xifeng Yan, William Yang Wang NAACL-HLT 2019   [Paper]  
• Learning to Compose Topic-Aware Mixture of Experts for Zero-Shot Video Captioning Xin Wang, Jiawei Wu, Da Zhang, Yu Su, William Yang Wang AAAI 2019   [Paper]  
• Quantifying Uncertainties in Natural Language Processing Tasks Yijun Xiao, William Yang Wang AAAI 2019   [Paper]  
• One-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2018   [Paper]  
• Hierarchical CVAE for Fine-Grained Hate Speech Classification Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Elizabeth Belding, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2018   [Paper]  
• Multi-view Models for Political Ideology Detection of News Articles Vivek Kulkarni, Junting Ye, Steve Skienam, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2018   [Paper]  
• XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework Wenhu Chen, Jianshu Chen, Yu Su, Xin Wang, Dong Yu, Xifeng Yan, William Yang Wang EMNLP 2018   [Paper]