About

I'm a research scientist in Amazon AWS AI working to advance the state-of-the-art of machine translation systems, primarily the Amazon Translate system. Prior to Amazon, I was a PhD student at Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University. My PhD advisor was Philipp Koehn.

During my graduate studies, I was primarily affiliated with Center for Language and Speech Processing and also did research on neural machine translation. Yet, I was also invovled in several projects focused on broader problems of natural language processing (both text and speech). I had also spent a few memorable months either interning at Microsoft Translator, Salesforce Research, Amazon, or visiting The University of Edinburgh.

Before joining Johns Hopkins, I got my Bachelor's degree in Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications. During the last year of my undergraduate study, I worked with Weiwei Sun in the Language Computing and Web Mining Group of Institute of Computer Science & Technology, Peking University, with a focus on semantic parsing and Chinese word segmentation.

News

• May 2022: I started to work full-time at Amazon AWS Translate.
• Apr 2022: Defended my doctoral dissertation!
• Aug 2021: Our work on using Levenshtein Transformer for word-level quality estimation will appear in EMNLP 2021.
• Aug 2021: I led the JHU-Microsoft team in the WMT21 word-level quality estimation shared task, where we rank the 1st place on Word-MCC metric for the English-German language pair. The paper describing our method will appear in WMT 2021.

Courses

• 600.465: Natural Language Processing
• 600.475: Machine Learning
• 600.468: Machine Translation
• 600.676: Machine Learning: Data to Models
• 050.620: Syntax I
• 600.615: Big Data, Small Languages, Scalable Systems
• 550.661: Nonlinear Optimization I
• 600.420: Parallel Programming

Teaching

• Nov 2021: Guest Lecture, EN.600.468/601.668 Machine Translation -- Analysis and Visualization
• Fall 2017: Graduate Teaching Assistant, EN.600.468/601.668 Machine Translation. Checkout the neural network and NMT homework I designed.
• Spring 2017: Guest Lecture, EN.600.435 Artificial Intelligence -- Markov Decision Process
• Spring 2016: Guest Lecture, EN.600.468 Machine Translation -- Syntax-Based Models

Publications

• Doubly-Trained Adversarial Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
  Weiting Tan, Shuoyang Ding, Huda Khayrallah, Philipp Koehn
  The 15th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA 2022) [pdf]

• The JHU-Microsoft Submission for WMT21 Quality Estimation Shared Task
  Shuoyang Ding, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Matt Post, Christian Federmann, Philipp Koehn
  Sixth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2021) [pdf][poster]

• Levenshtein Training for Word-level Quality Estimation
  Shuoyang Ding, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Matt Post, Philipp Koehn
  EMNLP 2021 [pdf][code][slides][poster][talk]

• Evaluating Saliency Methods for Neural Language Models
  Shuoyang Ding, Philipp Koehn
  NAACL 2021 [pdf][code][slides][talk]

• Espresso: A Fast End-to-end Neural Speech Recognition Toolkit
  Yiming Wang, Tongfei Chen, Hainan Xu, Shuoyang Ding, Hang Lv, Yiwen Shao, Nanyun Peng, Lei Xie, Shinji Watanabe, Sanjeev Khudanpur
  ASRU 2019 [pdf][code]

• A Call for Prudent Choice of Subword Merge Operations in Neural Machine Translation
  Shuoyang Ding, Adithya Renduchintala, Kevin Duh
  MT Summit 2019 [pdf][code][poster]

• An Exploration of Masking for Neural Machine Translation
  Matt Post, Shuoyang Ding, Marianna Martindale and Winston Wu
  MT Summit 2019 [pdf]

• Saliency-driven Word Alignment Interpretation for Neural Machine Translation
  Shuoyang Ding, Hainan Xu, Philipp Koehn
  Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2019 [pdf][code][slides]

• Parallelizable Stack Long Short-Term Memory
  Shuoyang Ding, Philipp Koehn
  NAACL 2019 Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP [pdf][bib][code][slides]

• Improving End-to-end Speech Recognition with Pronunciation-assisted Sub-word Modeling
  Hainan Xu, Shuoyang Ding, Shinji Watanabe
  ICASSP 2019 [pdf][bib][code]

• Multi-Modal Data Augmentation for End-to-end ASR
  Adithya Renduchintala, Shuoyang Ding, Matthew Wiesner, Shinji Watanabe
  Interspeech 2018 Best Student Paper Award (3/700+) [pdf][bib]

• The JHU Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2017
  Shuoyang Ding, Huda Khayrallah, Philipp Koehn, Matt Post, Gaurav Kumar, and Kevin Duh
  Second Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2017 [pdf][bib]

• The JHU Machine Translation Systems for WMT 2016
  Shuoyang Ding, Kevin Duh, Huda Khayrallah, Philipp Koehn, and Matt Post
  First Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2016 [pdf][bib]

• Grammatical Relations in Chinese: GB-Ground Extraction and Data-Driven Parsing
  Weiwei Sun, Yantao Du, Xin Kou, Shuoyang Ding, Xiaojun Wan
  Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2014 [pdf][bib]

Preprints

• How Do Source-side Monolingual Word Embeddings Impact Neural Machine Translation?
  Shuoyang Ding and Kevin Duh, 2018 [pdf]

• Backstitch: Counteracting Finite-sample Bias via Negative Steps
  Yiming Wang, Hossein Hadian, Shuoyang Ding, Ke Li, Hainan Xu, Xiaohui Zhang, Daniel Povey, Sanjeev Khudanpur, 2017 [pdf]