Quan Liu, PhD. 刘权  (How to pronounce?)

Principal Researcher, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, China
Research Scientist, Deputy Dean of iFLYTEK Research, Hefei, China
No.666, West Wangjiang Road, Hefei, China

Natural language processing is so interesting and I have been working in this field for 10 years. In 2016, the system constructed by us ranked 1st at the Winograd Schema Challenge (see wiki), a recent commonsense reasoning task held in IJCAI 2016, New York City, USA (NYU; MIT Technology Review; Nuance; IEEE Spectrum). Details for describing our Neural Association Model are available at here. In 2022, won the first place by 76.06% on CommonsenseQA 2.0, a new and challenging commonsense reasoning task.

Research works: Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing & AI, (2011~present)

• Commonsense Reasoning via Deep Learning
  Research in commonsense reasoning, neural-symbolic computing, etc.

• Semantic Representation for NLPs
  Represent natural language using neural network methods.

• Spoken Dialogue System
  Research in spoken language understanding, question answering and dialog management.

• Multi-modal human-computer interaction
  Research in Multi-modal human-computer interaction.

Some highlights

• 2022, Our paper (A Hierarchical Model with Conversation- and Tree-Structure Losses for Dialogue Disentanglement) is selected as Best Paper at the 2nd DialDoc Workshop co-located at ACL 2022.

• 2022, we won the first place by 76.06% accuracy on CommonsenseQA 2.0, a challenging commonsense reasoning task.

• 2022, we participated in SemEval 2022 MultiCoNER shared task and won the first place on 3 tracks (Chinese, Bangla, Code-Mixed). [paper].

• 2022, one paper working on Multi-lingual NLP has been accepted by ICASSP 2022. [paper].

• 2021, three papers working on Dialogue System have been accepted by SIGIR 2021 [paper], IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing ([paper]), and ICASSP 2021 [paper].

• 2020, two papers working on Dialogue System have been accepted by IJCAI 2020 [paper] and CIKM 2020 [paper].

• 2020, one paper working on Table Fact Verification has been accepted by EMNLP 2020. [paper].

• 2020, one paper working on Neural Sybomlic Reasoning has been accepted by COLING 2020. [paper].

• 2019, three papers working on Dialogue Response Selection have been accepted by EMNLP 2019 [paper], CIKM 2019 [paper] and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 2019. [paper].

• 2019, one paper working on Sentence Generation has been accepted by ICASSP 2019. [paper].

• 2018, we participated in IWSLT end-to-end speech translation track and won the first place. [paper].

• 2017, one paper working on Commonsense Reasoning has been accepted by IJCAI 2017. [paper].

• 2016, we participated in Winograd Schema Challenge and won the first place. [link].

• 2015, one paper working on Semantic Representation has been accepted by ACL 2015. [paper].

Publications

• Beiduo Chen, Wu Guo, Bin Gu, Quan Liu, Yongchao Wang. Multi-Level Contrastive Learning for Cross-Lingual Alignment. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2022. [pdf]

• Beiduo Chen, Jun-Yu Ma, Jiajun Qi, Wu Guo, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu. USTC-NELSLIP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Gazetteer-Adapted Integration Network for Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. The 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) 2022. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Hui Liu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen, Xiaodan Zhu. Partner Matters! An Empirical Study on Fusing Personas for Personalized Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots. International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2021. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Tianda Li, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu, Zhiming Su, Yu-Ping Ruan, Xiaodan Zhu. Deep Contextualized Utterance Representations for Response Selection and Dialogue Analysis. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), 2021. [pdf]

• Tianda Li, Jia-Chen Gu, Hui Liu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu, Zhiming Su, Xiaodan Zhu. Have You Made A Decision? Where? A Pilot Study on Interpretability of Polarity Analysis Based on Advising Problem. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2021. [pdf]

• Boyuan Zheng, Xiaoyu Yang, Yu-Ping Ruan, Zhenhua Ling, Quan Liu, Si Wei, Xiaodan Zhu. SemEval-2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning. The 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) 2021. [pdf]

• Hui Liu, Zhan Shi, Jia-Chen Gu, Quan Liu, Si Wei, Xiaodan Zhu. End-to-End Transition-Based Online Dialogue Disentanglement. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2020. [pdf]

• Xiaoyu Yang, Feng Nie, Yufei Feng, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen and Xiaodan Zhu. Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu, Zhigang Chen, Xiaodan Zhu. Filtering before Iteratively Referring for Knowledge-Grounded Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: (EMNLP) 2020. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Tianda Li, Quan Liu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Zhiming Su, Si Wei, Xiaodan Zhu. Speaker-Aware BERT for Multi-Turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots. The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2020. [pdf]

• Yufei Feng, Zi'ou Zheng, Quan Liu, Michael Greenspan and Xiaodan Zhu. Exploring End-to-End Differentiable Natural Logic Modeling. The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) 2020. [pdf]

• Yu-Ping Ruan, Zhen-Hua Ling, Xiaodan Zhu, Quan Liu, Jia-Chen Gu. Generating Diverse Conversation Responses by Creating and Ranking Multiple Candidates. Computer Speech & Language, 2020, 62:101071. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Tianda Li, Quan Liu, Xiaodan Zhu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Yu-Ping Ruan. Pre-Trained and Attention-Based Neural Networks for Building Noetic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems. AAAI 2020 Workshop on DSTC8, New York, USA.

• Yu-Ping Ruan, Zhen-Hua Ling, Jia-Chen Gu, Quan Liu. Fine-Tuning BERT for Schema-Guided Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking. AAAI 2020 Workshop on DSTC8, New York, USA.

• Jia-Chen Gu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu. Utterance-to-utterance Interactive Matching Network for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), 2019, 28:369-379. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Xiaodan Zhu, Quan Liu. Dually Interactive Matching Network for Personalized Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2019, Hong Kong, China. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu. Interactive Matching Network for Multi-Turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots. The 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2019, Beijing, China. [pdf]

• Yu-Ping Ruan, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu, Zhi-Gang Chen, Nitin Indurkhya. Condition-Transforming Varitional Autoencoder for Conversation Response Generation. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2019. [pdf]

• Yu-Ping Ruan, Zhen-Hua Ling, Quan Liu, Jia-Chen Gu, Xiaodan Zhu. Promoting Diversity for End-to-End Conversation Response Generation. AAAI 2019 Workshop on DSTC7, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. [pdf]

• Jia-Chen Gu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Yu-Ping Ruan, Quan Liu. Building Sequential Inference Models for End-to-End Response Selection. AAAI 2019 Workshop on DSTC7, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. [website] [pdf]

• Dan Liu, Junhua Liu, Wu Guo, Shifu Xiong, Zhiqiang Ma, Rui Song, Chongliang Wu, Quan Liu. The USTC-NEL Speech Translation system at IWSLT 2018. International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2018, Bruges, Belgium. [pdf]

• Joseph Sanu, Mingbin Xu, Hui Jiang, Quan Liu. Word Embeddings based on Fixed-Size Ordinally Forgetting Encoding. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark. [pdf]

• Quan Liu, Hui Jiang, Andrew Evdokimov, Zhen-Hua Ling, Xiaodan Zhu, Si Wei, Yu Hu. Cause-Effect Knowledge Acquisition and Neural Association Model for Solving A Set of Winograd Schema Problems. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2017, Melbourne, Australia, July 2017. [pdf]

• Quan Liu, Hui Jiang, Zhen-Hua Ling, Xiaodan Zhu, Si Wei, Yu Hu. Combing Context and Commonsense Knowledge Through Neural Networks for Solving Winograd Schema Problems. AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford, Palo Alto, U.S.A, March 2017. [pdf][slides]

• Quan Liu, Hui Jiang, Zhen-Hua Ling, Si Wei, Yu Hu. Probabilistic Reasoning via Deep Learning: Neural Association Models. IJCAI 2016 Workshop on Deep Learning for Artificial Intelligence (DLAI). New York, U.S.A, July, 2016. [pdf] [slides]

• Quan Liu, Wu Guo, Zhen-Hua Ling, Hui Jiang, Yu Hu. Intra-Topic Variability Normalization based on Linear Projection for Topic Classification. North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2016, San Diego, U.S.A, June, 2016. [pdf]

• Quan Liu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Hui Jiang, Yu Hu. Part-of-Speech Relevance Weights for Learning Word Embeddings. arXiv, 2016. [pdf]

• Quan Liu, Hui Jiang, Si Wei, Zhen-Hua Ling, Yu Hu. Learning Semantic Word Embeddings based on Ordinal Knowledge Constraints. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2015, Beijing, China, July, 2015. [pdf] [toolkit]

• Quan Liu, Wu Guo, Zhen-Hua Ling. Integrate Document Ranking Information into Confidence Measure Calculation for Spoken Term Detection. arXiv, 2015. [pdf]

Academic job

• TACL Standing Reviewer (2022-2024). Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, TACL.

• ACL 2021 Area Chair. Semantics: Sentence-levelSemantics, Textual Inference and Other Areas, ACL 2021.

• NLPCC 2020 Area Chair. Conversational Bot/QA, NLPCC 2020.

• Program Committee. Thirteenth International Symposium on Commonsense Reasoning Commonsense Reasoning, Commonsense 2017.

Awards and honors

• Best Paper Award of ACL 2022 DialDoc Workshop, 2022.

• ACM 2021 China Rising Star (Hefei Chapter) Award. Awarded by Association for Computing Machinery, 2021.

• Outstanding Graduates (PhD) of University of Science and Technology of China, 2017, China.

• Best Internship Award of iFLYTEK Research 2014. Hefei, China.

• Best Student Paper Award of National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communication 2013. Guiyang, China.

• National Undergraduate Scholarship 2009. Awarded by Ministry of Education, China.