Hi! I am a third-year PhD candidate at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a member of PolyU NLP Group,
advised by Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li.
Currently, I am visiting the SLED Lab at University of Michigan,
where I am honored to work with Prof. Joyce Chai.
Before that, I received my MSc and BEng degrees from the School of Computer Science and Engineering,
South China University of Technology (SCUT), in 2020 and 2017, respectively.
During the 2018 to 2019, I was fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Min Yang at SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Research
I have broad interests in Conversational AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), including but not limited to the following topics:
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Interactive dialogue systems. I am dedicated to empowering AI agents to converse with humans more proactively (e.g., goal/target-directed dialogues), more consistently, and more tailored to individuals.
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Controllable language generation. I am interested in controlling natural language generation by planning with world knowledge (e.g., commonsense, social, and physical knowledge).
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Situated and multimodal interactions. I am interested in human-AI collaborations in specific scenarios and
learning from situated communications.
😀 I am open to collaborations and discussions. Please feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in my research or any relevant topics.
News
[May 2024] 🔥 Got one paper accepted by ACL 2024! Welcome to have a chat in Bangkok.
[Dec. 2023] 🔥 Will be visiting the SLED Lab at University of Michigan, starting from Feb. 2024. Very excited!
[Oct. 2023]   Got two papers accepted by EMNLP 2023! Will be heading to Singpore in December.
[Jul. 2023]   Will be heading to Toronto for ACL 2023. The first time to attend an in-person academic conference during my PhD and to visit abroad during my life!
[May 2023]   Got two papers accepted as Findings of ACL 2023!
[Apr. 2023]   Passed the confirmation of registration at PolyU. Officially became a PhD candidate!
Selected Publications
2021 - Present
Instruct Once, Chat Consistently in Multiple Rounds: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Dialogue
Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jiashuo Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li, and Xiao-Yong Wei.
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
[arXiv]
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Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue
Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2024.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal
Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Yi Ouyang, Wenjie Li, Xian Wu, and Yefeng Zheng.
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation
Jian Wang, Yi Cheng, Dongding Lin, Chak Tou Leong, and Wenjie Li.
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal
Chak Tou Leong, Yi Cheng, Jiashuo Wang, Jian Wang, and Wenjie Li.
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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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 (ACL-Findings), 2023.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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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]
[code]
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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]
2018 - 2021 (Before PhD)
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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]
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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]
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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]
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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
Competitions
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
Reviewer
- Conferences: ACL Rolling Review (ARR), ACL (2023, 2024), EMNLP (2022, 2023), COLING (2020, 2022)
- Journal: Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
Open-Source Projects
- 📖 Paper-Reading-ConvAI: Reading list in dialogue systems and natural language generation.
- 🐳 PyLoader: An asynchronous Python dataloader for loading big datasets.
Useful Resources
Misc.
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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.
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I dream of traveling around China and many places around the world someday.