Xuchen Yao (姚旭晨), Dept. of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University.



Publication
Code

About Me


I'm a PhD candidate starting from 2010 with a research interest in natural language processing, specifically, question answering and monolingual alignment. My super2visors are Benjamin Van Durme and Chris Callison-Burch.

Short Bio


Bachelor of Science in Acoustics. Department of Electronic and Science Engineering, Nanjing University, China. 2002 - 2006.

European Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies (EMLCT):
Master of Arts in Linguistics. Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. 2008 - 2009.
Master of Science in Language Science and Technology. Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University, Germany. 2009 - 2010.

Jacana!


My main PhD research yields jacana, an NLP package for Question Answering and Monolingual Alignment. It consists of two parts:
  • jacana-qa, a Question Answering engine for TREC-style questions, written in Java.
  • jacana-align, a monolingual word aligner for English, written in Java and Scala.
All the code is hosted at Google Code. There are more details in Publication.

Master Thesis


Xuchen Yao. Question Generation with Minimal Recursion Semantics. Master Thesis. Saarland University & University of Groningen. 2010. (slides)

Two implementation systems can be found at Code.

A condensed and revised version of the long Master thesis was published to Journal of Dialogue and Discourse: Semantics-based Question Generation and Implementation.

An evaluation of Question Generation tools used in a Question Answer engine: Creating Conversational Characters Using Question Generation Tools.

Experience


2013. Internship. Google Research with Dekang Lin.
2013/3/27. Invited student talk at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center on Feature-driven Question Answering and QA-driven Information Retrieval.
2012. Internship. Vulcan Inc with Peter Clark.
2011. Internship. USC/ISI with David Chiang.
2010-2011. Teaching Assistant for Prof. Eisner's NLP class (600.465).
2011. Teaching Assistant for Prof. Yarowsky's Information Retrieval and Web Agents (600.466).
2010. Visiting Research Student. Department of Chinese, Translation & Linguistics. City University of Hong Kong.
2010. Internship. Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Sourthern California.
2008. Internship. Nokia Research Center Beijing.
2007. Internship. America On Line China Lab.
2006. Student. Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
2006. Internship. The Next Generation Java team, Motorola Global Software Group.
2005. Internship. EnReach Technology,Inc.