Jian Wang (王健) PhD Student Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China Email: jian-dylan.wang (at) connect.polyu.hk   or                jwanglvy (at) gmail.com Resume   |   Github   |   Google Scholar   |   Twitter

I am a third-year PhD student at Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), advised by Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li. Before that, I received my MSc and BEng degrees from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, in 2020 and 2017, respectively. During the 2018 to 2019 period, I was co-advised by Prof. Min Yang at SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Research

I have broad interests in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Conversational AI. Especially, I focus on the following directions:

• Interactive dialogue systems (e.g., goal/target-directed dialogues, task-oriented dialogues). I am dedicated to empowering machines to interact with humans through natural, coherent, and proactive conversations.
• Embodied and situated interactions. I am interested in enabling embodied agents to learn from situated communication (e.g., situated dialogues) with humans and collaborate with humans on complex tasks.
• Natural language generation. I am interested in how world knowledge (e.g., commonsense, factual, physical, and social knowledge) can be grounded and incorporated in natural language generation.

Selected Publications

(see full list in Google Scholar)

2021 - Present

• Dialogue Planning via Brownian Bridge Stochastic Process for Goal-directed Proactive Dialogue

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

• A Target-driven Planning Approach for Goal-directed Dialog Systems

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
  IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2023.
  [paper] [PDF]

• COLA: Improving Conversational Recommender Systems by Collaborative Augmentation

  Dongding Lin*, Jian Wang*, and Wenjie Li.     (*: Equal Contribution)
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023.
  [arXiv] [paper]

• Follow Me: Conversation Planning for Target-driven Recommendation Dialogue Systems

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.03516, 2022
  [arXiv] [code]

2018 - 2021 (Before PhD)

• Template-guided Clarifying Question Generation for Web Search Clarification

  Jian Wang and Wenjie Li.
  ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2021.
  [paper] [slides] [code]

• Dual Dynamic Memory Network for End-to-End Multi-turn Task-oriented Dialog Systems

  Jian Wang, Junhao Liu, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Kejing He, Ruifeng Xu, and Min Yang.
  International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2020.
  [paper] [code]

• Improving Knowledge-aware Dialogue Generation via Knowledge Base Question Answering

  Jian Wang, Junhao Liu, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Kejing He, Ruifeng Xu, and Min Yang.
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

• Topic Discovery by Spectral Decomposition and Clustering with Coordinated Global and Local Contexts

  Jian Wang, Kejing He, and Min Yang.
  International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (JMLC), 2020.
  [paper] [PDF]

Experiences

• 2020/11 - 2021/08: Research assistant at PolyU (Advisor: Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li)
• 2020/07 - 2020/10: Research intern at Rulai Inc. (Advisor: Dr. Yi Zhang)
• 2018/08 - 2019/09: Visiting student at SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Advisor: Prof. Min Yang)

Competitions

• [2021/06] Third Prize of 2021 Baidu Language and Intelligence Challenge: Multi-skill Dialogue
• [2018/12] Third Prize of Byte Cup 2018 International Machine Learning Contest
• [2017/10] Global Ranking of 50/2121 on IEEE Xtreme 11.0 Programming Competition
• [2016/05] Bronze Medal of 2016 HUAWEI Code Craft (Shenzhen Area Site)

Professional Activities

Teaching Assistant

• COMP 6709: Advanced Natural Language Processing, Spring 2023 | 2022, PolyU
• COMP 2021: Object-Oriented Programming, Fall 2022 | 2021, PolyU
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Spring 2018, SCUT
• Advanced Programming Language (C++), Fall 2017, SCUT

Conference Reviewer

• ACL (2023), EMNLP (2022, 2023), COLING (2020, 2022)

Open-Source Projects

• 📖 Paper-Reading: Reading list in dialogue systems and natural language generation (constantly updating 🤗).
• 🐳 PyLoader: An asynchronous Python dataloader for loading big datasets.

Useful Resources

• ⏳ AI Conference Deadlines: Countdowns to top CV/NLP/ML/Robotics/AI conference deadlines.
• 📝 Writing Perfect Papers (Bilibili | Youtube | Slides): A long talk on writing "perfect papers" (by Prof. Baochun Li).
• 📰 Sebastian Ruder's Blog: Sebastian Ruder's blog with deep insights about NLP/ML/DL.
• 🍑 Lilian Weng's Blog: Lilian Weng's blog with broad learning notes about DL/NLP.
• 📸 Jay Alammar's Blog: Visualizations and animations for many language models (Transformer, BERT, etc).
• 📡 Scientific Spaces: Jianlin Su's blog (in Chinese) about ML|NLP theories with deep explorations.
• 👩‍🎓 Global Equality for PhDs: Resources to help global equality for PhDs in NLP/AI.

Misc.

• I enjoy Chinese calligraphy and most outdoor sports (especially basketball, table tennis, and badminton). I also spend my leisure time on variety shows, literature books, and movies.

• I dream of traveling around China and many places around the world someday.