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Yufei Tian

About Me

Welcome! I am a CS PhD student at UCLA, under the supervision of Professor Nanyun Peng. My research interest lies in natural language processing and its connection with the real world (both socially and physically). I'm currently working on knowledge enhanced text generation and creative text generation. My research on creative text generation is partially supported by Amazon.

Education

University of California, Los Angeles USA • 2021 — Present

Ph.D. student at CS Department

University of Southern California, USA • 2020 — 2021

Ph.D. student at CS Department

Tsinghua University, China • 2016 — 2020

Bachelor of Engineering (Automation), Minor in Finance

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore • Fall 2018

Exchange student at CSE Department

Preprints and Publications

  1. Zero-shot Sonnet Generation with Discourse-level Planning and Aesthetics Features

    2. Yufei Tian and Nanyun Peng. NAACL 2022

  2. Go Back in Time - Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Plots and Temporal Prompts

    3. Rujun Han, Hong Chen, Yufei Tian, and Nanyun Peng NAACL 2022

  3. AmbiPun - Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

    4. Anirudh Mittal*, Yufei Tian* (equal contribution), and Nanyun Peng NAACL 2022 (Short)

  4. HypoGen - Hyperbole Generation with Commonsense and Counterfactual Knowledge

    5. Yufei Tian, Arvind krishna Sridhar, and Nanyun Peng. Findings of EMNLP 2021

  5. Identifying Cultural Differences through Multi-Lingual Wikipedia

    6. Yufei Tian, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Fred Morstatter, and Nanyun Peng. SocialNLP@NAACL2021

  6. Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation

    7. Chun Fan, Yufei Tian, Yuxian Meng, Nanyun Peng, Xiaofei Sun, Fei Wu, Jiwei Li. Preprint

  7. Aspect and Opinion Aware Abstractive Review Summarization with Reinforced Hard Typed Decoder

    8. Yufei Tian, Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang. CIKM 2019

Experience

Shannon AI, NLP Intern • Jul 2020 — Oct 2020

Worked on paraphrase generation via domain adaptation. Advisor: Jiwei Li

Information Science Institute, USC, Research Assistant • Jul 2019 — Sep 2019

Worked on identifying perspectives of colingual groups through multi-lingual wikipedia. Advisor: Nanyun Peng and Fred Morstatter

Singapore Management University, Research Assistant • Aug 2018 — Dec 2018

Worked on abstractive review summarization with typed decoders. Advisor: Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang

Honors

2022, Amazon Fellowship

Supports research on creative text generation

2021, George Bekey Fellow

USC Viterbi fellowship top-off, from the George Bekey Graduate Fellowship Fund

2019, Dengfeng Scholarship

top 2% awarded for distinction in Information Technology

2015, Intel Outstanding Award on Computer Science

awarded by Intel Corporation at CASTIC (top 2/1500 = 0.0013%)

Miscellaneous

Classical Music - I was a french horn player in the awesome and long-established Tsinghua University Symphonic Band.

Sports - I have been playing tennis for over 10 years. Besides, I was the keeper of Tsinghua University Women Cricket Team in 2018 when we won a runner-up in Beijing!

Social Links

  • Github: https://github.com/NinaTian98369
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/yufei_t
  • Website: https://yufeitian.github.io/website/