YuchenLIN.xyz

Ph.D. student @ USC/ISI

"We were language’s magpies by nature,
stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny."
University of Southern California
USC/ISI

(Bill) Yuchen Lin

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, working with Prof. Xiang Ren who leads the Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Research Lab. Previously, I got my bachelor's degree at the IEEE Honor Class in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, supervised by Prof. Kenny Q. Zhu.

I am generally interested in building neuro-symbolic systems that demonstrate a deep understanding of the world, integrating technologies for information extraction, knowledge graphs, machine reasoning, graph neural networks and model robustness. My recent research aims to advance natural language processing (understanding & generation) with commonsense reasoning.

[INK Lab]   [CV]   [Twitter]   [Instgram]
[Google Scholar]   [Semantic Scholar]   [DBLP]

News

2020-05-15:  My google internship work was accepted to KDD 2020 as a full research paper! Thanks to my amazing mentors: Ying, Nguyen, and Sandeep!
2020-04-23:  Our NERO paper was nominated to be BEST PAPER AWARD (2 out of 1500 submissions) in The Web Conf (WWW) 2020.
2020-04-03:  Three papers have been accepted to the ACL 2020! Thanks for my wonderful collaborators.
2019-12-19:  Had a great week in Beijing & invited talks at THU, MSRA, and PKU.
2019-12-01:  I will work as a research intern at Google AI again in 2020 summer, with William W. Cohen's team in Pittsburgh.
2019-11-13:  Invited talk on "Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Understanding and Generation" at Westlake University, Hangzhou, China.
2019-11-02:  Traveling for EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 in Hong Kong, China.
2019-08-12:  Our work KagNet for commonsense reasoning is accepted as an long paper (w/ oral presentation) to EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019.
2019-08-01:  The AlpacaTag annotation framework (ACL 2019 demo) is online now!
2019-05-19:  Our work in building active learning-based sequence tagging annotation framework has been accepted to ACL 2019.
2019-01-10:  Will take a research internship at Google AI in the comming summer!
2018-11-11:  Had my very first travel in Europe for the EMNLP! Love Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels!!!
2018-08-10:  Two papers have been accepted to the EMNLP 2018 !!
2018-07-24:  Attended the ACL 2018 and had a wonderful travel in Melbourne & Sydney!
2018-06-27:  Succeeded in my Bachelor's Thesis Defense and earned Best Thesis Award (Top 1% at SJTU & 1st in the CSE Department.)
2018-05-29:  Invited as a reviewer of EMNLP 2018!
2018-05-29:  Will be a volunteer for the ACL 2018. And thanks to the ACL Walker Fund for the support towards my travel expenses.
2018-04-21:  Two papers have been accepted to the ACL 2018 !!
2018-04-03:  I will become a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at USC/ISI with an Annenberg Fellowship Award this fall.

Publications

Preprints

Published Papers

  1. FreeDOM: A Transferable Neural Architecture for Structured Information Extraction on Web Documents
    Bill Yuchen Lin, Ying Sheng, Nguyen Vo and Sandeep Tata
    To appear in Proc. of KDD 2020 (Acceptance Rate: 16.8%)

  2. TriggerNER: Learning with Entity Triggers as Explanations for Named Entity Recognition
    Bill Yuchen Lin*, Dongho Lee*, Ming Shen, Ryan Moreno, Xiao Huang, Prashant Shiralkar and Xiang Ren
    in Proc. of ACL 2020
    [Slides]   [Video]   [Github]   [Project Page]

  3. Learning to Contextually Aggregate Multi-Source Supervision for Sequence Labeling.
    Ouyu Lan, Xiao Huang, Bill Yuchen Lin, He Jiang, Liyuan Liu and Xiang Ren
    in Proc. of ACL 2020
    [Github]

  4. LEAN-LIFE: A Label-Efficient Annotation Framework Towards Learning from Explanation
    Dong-Ho Lee, Rahul Khanna, Bill Yuchen Lin, Jamin Chen, Seyeon Lee, Qinyuan Ye, Elizabeth Boschee, Leonardo Neves and Xiang Ren
    in Proc. of ACL 2020 (Demo Track)
    [Project Page]

  5. NERO: A Neural Rule Grounding Framework for Label-Efficient Relation Extraction.
    Wenxuan Zhou, Hongtao Lin, Bill Yuchen Lin, Ziqi Wang, Junyi Du, Leonardo Neves, Xiang Ren
    in Proc. of TheWebConf (WWW) 2020
    Best Paper Runner-up (2/1500+)    [Github]

  6. KagNet: Knowledge-Aware Graph Networks for Commonsense Reasoning.
    Bill Yuchen Lin, Xinyue Chen, Jamin Chen and Xiang Ren
    in Proc. of EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
    [Github]

  7. AlpacaTag: An Active Learning-based Crowd Annotation Framework for Sequence Tagging.
    Bill Yuchen Lin*, Dongho Lee*, Frank F. Xu, Ouyu Lan and Xiang Ren
    in Proc. of ACL 2019 (Demo Track)
    [Project Page]

  8. Neural Adaptation Layers for Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition.
    Bill Yuchen Lin and Wei Lu
    in Proc. of EMNLP 2018
    [Github]

  9. ExtRA: Extracting Prominent Review Aspects from Customer Feedback.
    Zhiyi Luo, Shanshan Huang, Frank F. Xu, Bill Yuchen Lin, Hanyuan Shi and Kenny Q. Zhu
    in Proc. of EMNLP 2018
    [Github]

  10. Mining Cross-Cultural Differences and Similarities in Social Media.
    Bill Yuchen Lin*, Frank F. Xu*, Kenny Q. Zhu and Seung-won Hwang
    in Proc. of ACL 2018
    [Github]

  11. Automatic Extraction of Commonsense LocatedNear Knowledge.
    Bill Yuchen Lin*, Frank F. Xu* and Kenny Q. Zhu
    in Proc. of ACL 2018
    [Github]

  12. Multi-channel BiLSTM-CRF Model for Emerging Named Entity Recognition in Social Media.
    Bill Y. Lin*, Frank F. Xu*, Zhiyi Luo and Kenny Q. Zhu
    in Proc. of EMNLP 2017, Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text
    [Github]

Invited Talks

Services

Program Committee Member and Reviewer:
  • Main conferences: EMNLP 2020, ACL 2020, AKBC 2020, IJCAI 2020, AAAI 2020, COLING 2020, AACL-IJCNLP 2020, CCL 2020 EMNLP 2019, IJCAI 2019, EMNLP 2018, NLPCC 2019
  • Workshops: ACL 2020 RepL4NLP, EMNLP 2019 DeepLo, ACL 2019 RepL4NLP, ACL 2019 SRW, ICLR 2019 LLD
Student Volunteer: ACL 2018

Honors & Awards

  1. Best Paper Runner Up, WWW 2020
  2. Travel Support for ACL2018, ACL Walker Fund, 2018
  3. Best Bachelor Thesis Award (Top 1% at SJTU & 1st in the CSE Department), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2018
  4. Annenberg Fellowship Award, University of Southern California, 2018
  5. Yuanqing Yang's Scholarship (CNY 25k), the foundation of Class 1988 in CS@Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2018
  6. Qide Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2018
  7. Excellent Undergraduate Sutdent Scholarship, Shanghai City, 2016-2017
  8. Academic Excellence Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2016-2017

Education

Experience

  • Google AI
    Research Intern
    Leader: William W. Cohen
    May. 2020 -- Aug. 2020
    Differentiable Neural-Symbolic Reasoning with Commonsense Knowledge

  • Google AI, Mountain View, California
    Research Intern
    Leader: Sandeep Tata
    May. 2019 -- Aug. 2019
    Transferable Structured Data Extraction over Semi-Structured Documents. See our KDD 2020 paper, FreeDOM.

  • Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
    Research Intern
    Leader: Jian-Guang Lou
    Sept. 2017 -- Mar. 2018
    Semantic Parsing and Question Answering for Tabular Data Analysis. The work is now part of the Excel features. Check here for a review.

  • ADAPT Lab, SJTU, China
    Research Assistant
    w/ Prof. Kenny Q. Zhu
    May. 2016 -- Jun. 2018
    Text Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Relation Extraction, Spatiotemporal Data Mining, etc.

  • StatNLP Group, SUTD, Singapore
    Visiting Fellow
    w/ Prof. Wei Lu
    Jun. 2017 -- Sept. 2017
    Transfer Learning in NLP.

MISC.

  • BiLL = Beauty in Language Learning! Will be always 'Bill Yuchen Lin' on publications to be consistent with previous papers, although I would be more than happy to be called Yuchen.
  • I always reply emails in less than ten days (usually less than a week). If you don't get a reply, please send a reminder as it may be marked as spam by the email system of USC.
  • I was one of the editors of Linguistic Lunch (语言学午餐), a linguistic blog in Chinese based on WeChat Official Account (@ling-lunch). We had 180k subscribers.