Yang Deng (邓扬)

Assistant Professor
School of Computing and Information Systems
Singapore Management University

[Email] [Google Scholar]

HIRING I am actively looking for highly motivated PhD students. I have several SMU-funded visiting student positions avaiable (standard monthly stipend of 2700 SGD). Self-funded visiting scholars (e.g., CSC Project) and remote collaborations are also welcomed. Feel free to reach out to me as [Openings].

I am currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in NExT++, National University of Singapore, working with Prof. Tat-Seng Chua and Prof. See-Kiong Ng. I received my Ph.D degree at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Wai Lam (CUHK Text Mining Group).

My research mainly lies in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), and Large Language Models (LLM) – with special focus on

• Proactive Conversational AI
  Survey [IJCAI 2023], Tutorial [ACL 2023] [SIGIR-AP 2023],
  Non-collaborative Dialogues [ICLR 2024] [EMNLP 2024] [EMNLP 2023 Findings],
  Target-guided Dialogues [EMNLP 2024] [EMNLP 2024 Findings] [TOIS 2023],
  Emotional Support Dialogues [ACL 2024] [ACL 2023],
  Clarifications [ACL 2024 Findings] [EMNLP 2022]
• Trust and Reliability of Large Language Models
  Knowledge Boundary [Survey] [EMNLP 2024] [EMNLP 2024] [ACL 2024],
  Robustness [ICLR 2025] [AAAI 2025],
  Hallucination [EMNLP 2024 Findings] [EMNLP 2023],
  Safety [arxiv] [EMNLP 2023 Findings]
• Language Model Powered Agents
  Tutorial [WWW 2024] [SIGIR 2024], Role-playing Agent [Survey],
  Human-Agent Interaction [ACL 2024] [EMNLP 2024 Findings], Memory [NAACL 2025]
• Human-centered Information Seeking
  Perspectives Paper [SIGIR 2024], User Understanding [arxiv] [EMNLP 2023 Findings] [WWW 2022],
  Personalization [EMNLP 2023 Findings] [ACL 2023 Findings] [TOIS 2022]

NEWS (Mar 2025) Invited to serve as Area Chairs of COLM 2025.
NEWS (Feb 2025) Invited to serve as Handbook Chairs of AACL 2025.
NEWS (Jan 2025) One paper accepted by ICLR 2025 and two by NAACL 2025 (one main and one findings).
NEWS (Jan 2025) The extended version of the proactive conversational AI survey was accepted by TOIS.
NEWS (Dec 2024) One tutorial proposal accepted by WWW 2025 and two papers by AAAI 2025.
NEWS (Nov 2024) Invited Task: AI Risks and Safety @ IMDA's Technical Sharing Session.
NEWS (Nov 2024) Received EMNLP 2024 Outstanding Area Chair Awards and NeurIPS 2024 Best Reviewer Awards.
NEWS (Nov 2024) Received Google South Asia & Southeast Asia Research Awards 2024.
NEWS (Nov 2024) Served as Program Chairs of SSNLP 2024.
NEWS (Sep 2024) Nine papers accepted by EMNLP 2024 (five main and four findings).
NEWS (Aug 2024) Invited Task: LLM-powered Conversational Agents @ Huawei Software Technology Summit 2024.
NEWS (July 2024) Joined SMU SCIS as an Assistant Professor.