Yang Deng

Yang Deng

Postdoc Research Fellow @ NUS NExT++

I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow in NExT++, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, working with Prof. Tat-Seng Chua and Prof. See-Kiong Ng. Before that, I received my Ph.D degree at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Wai Lam.

My research mainly lies in natural language processing and information retrieval – with special focus on

  • Proactive Conversational AI
  • User-centric Information Seeking
  • Actionable and Agentic Language Models
  • Knowledge-driven Computing

Email: dengyang17dydy AT gmail DOT com

NEWS: Our lab welcomes research interns and visiting scholars (e.g., CSC Joint PhD Project). If you are interested in my research topics, you can send me an email for more information.

Education

  • Aug. 2019 - Mar. 2023, Ph.D.,
    Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management,
    The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Sept. 2016 - Jun. 2019, M.S.,
    School of Electronic & Computer Engineering,
    Peking University
  • Sept. 2012 - Jun. 2016, B.E.,
    School of Electronic Engineering,
    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Selected Publications

Tutorial & Survey

  • Goal Awareness for Conversational AI: Proactivity, Non-collaborativity, and Beyond
    Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua.
    In The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023 Tutorial).
    [abs][slides]
  • Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Qian Yu, Wai Lam.
    In The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).
    [pdf]
  • A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects
    Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wai Lam, Tat-Seng Chua.
    In The 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023 Survey Track).
    [arxiv][repo]
  • A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Tasks, Methods, and Challenges.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam.
    IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE 2022).

Journal

  • A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Weiwen Xu, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua, Wai Lam.
    To appear in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 2023).
    [arxiv][code&data]
  • Leveraging Long Short-Term User Preference in Conversational Recommendation Via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning.
    Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Wai Lam.
    IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE 2022).
  • Towards Personalized Answer Generation in E-Commerce via Multi-Perspective Preference Modeling.
    Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Wenxuan Zhang, Bolin Ding, Wai Lam.
    ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 2022).
    [arxiv][code&data]
  • Contextualized Knowledge-aware Attentive Neural Network: Enhancing Answer Selection with Knowledge.
    Yang Deng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Wai Lam, Ying Shen.
    ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 2021).

Conference

  • Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Lam.
    In The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).
    [pdf][code]
  • Learning to Ask Clarification Questions with Spatial Reasoning
    Yang Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Wai Lam.
    In The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023).
    [pdf][code&data]
  • PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance.
    Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, Tat-Seng Chua.
    In The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022).
    [pdf][code&data]
  • ConReader: Exploring Implicit Relations in Contracts for Contract Clause Extraction.
    Weiwen Xu, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenlong Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua, Wai Lam.
    In The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022).
  • User Satisfaction Estimation with Sequential Dialogue Act Modeling in Goal-oriented Conversational Systems.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, Hong Cheng, Helen Meng.
    In The ACM Web Conference 2022 (WWW 2022).
    [arxiv][code&data]
  • Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-enhanced Reinforcement Learning.
    Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Fei Sun, Bolin Ding, Wai Lam.
    In The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021).
    [arxiv][code]
  • Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Yang Deng, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam.
    In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021).
  • Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Yifei Yuan, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam.
    In The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021).
  • Exploiting Reasoning Chains for Multi-hop Science Question Answering.
    Weiwen Xu, Yang Deng, Huihui Zhang, Deng Cai, Wai Lam.
    In Findings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021 Findings).
  • Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Question Answering Forums.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam.
    In Findings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021 Findings).
  • Intra-/Inter-Interaction Network with Latent Interaction Modeling for Multi-turn Response Selection.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam.
    In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020).
  • Multi-hop Inference for Question-driven Summarization.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam.
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020).
    [arxiv][code]
  • AnswerFact: Fact Checking in Product Question Answering.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Jing Ma, Wai Lam.
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020).
  • Opinion-aware Answer Generation for Review-driven Question Answering in E-Commerce.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam.
    In The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020).
    [arxiv][code&data]
  • Bridging Hierarchical and Sequential Context Modeling for Question-driven Extractive Answer Summarization.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Wai Lam and Ying Shen.
    In The 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020).
    [pdf][code&data]
  • Answer Ranking for Product-Related Questions via Multiple Semantic Relations Modeling.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Wai Lam.
    In The 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020).
    [arxiv]
  • Review-guided Helpful Answer Identification in E-commerce.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, Yang Deng, Jing Ma.
    In The World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2020).
    [arxiv]
  • Joint Learning of Answer Selection and Answer Summary Generation in Community Question Answering.
    Yang Deng, Wai Lam, Yuexiang Xie, Daoyuan Chen Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Ying Shen.
    In Proceedings of the 34rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020).
    [arxiv][data]
  • MedTruth: A Semi-supervised Approach to Discovering Knowledge Condition Information from Multi-Source Medical Data.
    Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Ying Shen, Nan Du, Wei Fan, Min Yang, Kai Lei.
    In The 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2019).
    [arxiv]
  • Multi-Task Learning with Multi-View Attention for Answer Selection and Knowledge Base Question Answering.
    Yang Deng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Min Yang, Wei Fan, Kai Lei, Ying Shen.
    In Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019).
    [pdf][data]
  • Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge.
    Yang Deng, Ying Shen, Min Yang, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Wei Fan, Kai Lei.
    In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018).
    [pdf][BibTex]
  • Knowledge-aware Attention based Neural Network for Ranking Question Answering Pairs.
    Ying Shen, Yang Deng*, Min Yang, Yaliang Li, Nan Du, Wei Fan, Kai Lei. (*Main Author)
    In The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018).
    [pdf][code&data][BibTex]

Experiences

  • Feb. 2022 - Aug. 2022, Visiting Research Scholar, NExT++ Lab, National University of Singapore
  • Aug. 2020 - Feb. 2022, Research Intern, DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group
  • Mar. 2018 - Jun. 2018, Research Intern, Tencent Medical AI Lab
  • Oct. 2016 - Aug. 2017, Research Assistant, Multimedia Software Engineering Research Center @ City University of Hong Kong

Professional Activities

  • Regular Reviewer (or PC Member): WWW, WSDM, ACL Rolling Review, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ACM Trans. on Information Systems, Neurocomputing, Knowledge-Based Systems, ACM Trans. on Web, Computer Science Review
  • External Reviewer: TACL, TPAMI, TKDE, SIGIR, CIKM

Honors & Awards

  • ACM SIGIR Student Travel Grant, SIGIR 2018, CIKM 2019, SIGIR 2020, CIKM 2020, SIGIR 2021
  • 2019, Excellent Graduate Award (top 2%), Beijing
  • 2019, Excellent Graduate Award, Peking University
  • AAAI Student Scholarship, 2019
  • 2016, Excellent Graduate Award (top 10%), Beijing