About

Greetings! My name is Qi Zeng (曾琪).

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My focus of research area is Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially Long Document Understanding:

• Efficient Transformers for Long Sequence Processing
• Document-level Event Extraction and Representation
• Consistent Document Summarization

If you are interested in research collaboration feel free to contact me at qizeng2 [AT] illinois [DOT] edu.

I work hard so my cats Peanut Butter and Honey Butter can have a better life.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• PhD in Computer Science, 2019 - 12/2023 (expected)
• MS in Computer Science (on the way to PhD)
• Graduate Research Assistant at Blender Lab, Advisor: Prof. Heng Ji

Peking University

• BS in Information Science, 2014 - 2018
• Previously majored in Germen Language and Literature, 2013 - 2014
• Undergraduate Reseach Assistant at Language Computing and Machine Learning Group, Advisor: Prof. Xu Sun

Internship

• Google Research, Brain STAR Team, Research Intern, 2023 Summer
• Amazon Search, Query Understanding Team, Research Intern, 2022 Summer
• Microsoft Research, Cognitive Services Research Group, Research Intern, 2021 Summer
• Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), AllenNLP Team, Research Intern, 2020 Summer
• ByteDance AI Lab, MLNLP Group, Research Intern, 2019 Summer
• Microsoft Research Asia, Big Data Mining Group, Research Intern, 2018 Spring
• Microsoft Search Technology Center Asia, XiaoIce Group, Software Engineer Intern, 2017 Spring

Publications

[Google Scholar]. [DBLP]. [Semantic Scholar].

* means equal contribution.

2023

• Meta-review Generation with Checklist-guided Iterative Introspection
  Qi Zeng*, Mankeerat Sidhu*, Hou Pong Chan, Lu Wang, Heng Ji
  [PDF] [Code and Data]

• SmartBook: AI-Assisted Situation Report Generation
  Revanth Gangi Reddy, Yi R. Fung, Qi Zeng, Manling Li, Ziqi Wang, Paul Sullivan, Heng Ji
  [PDF] [Code] [Demo]

• Interpretable Automatic Fine-grained Inconsistency Detection in Text Summarization
  Hou Pong Chan, Qi Zeng, Heng Ji
  ACL 2023
  [PDF] [Code]

• C-PMI: Conditional Pointwise Mutual Information for Turn-level Dialogue Evaluation
  Liliang Ren*, Mankeerat Sidhu*, Qi Zeng, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Heng Ji, Chengxiang Zhai
  ACL 2023 (DialDoc Workshop)
  

2022

• Efficient Reward Poisoning Attacks on Online Deep Reinforcement Learning
  Yinglun Xu, Qi Zeng, Gagandeep Singh
  [PDF] [Code]
  

• RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios
  Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, QING LYU, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
  NAACL 2022 (Demo Paper)
  [PDF] [Code]

• EA$^2$E: Improving Consistency with Event Awareness for Document-level Argument Extraction
  Qi Zeng*, Qiusi Zhan*, Heng Ji
  NAACL 2022 (Short Paper)
  [PDF] [Code]

• Sketching as a Tool for Understanding and Accelerating Self-attention for Long Sequences
  Yifan Chen*, Qi Zeng*, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Di Jin, Heng Ji, Yun Yang
  NAACL 2022
  [PDF] [Code]

2021

• Skyformer: Remodel Self-Attention with Gaussian Kernel and Nystr"om Method
  Yifan Chen*, Qi Zeng*, Heng Ji, Yun Yang
  NeurIPS 2021
  [PDF] [Code] [Poster]. [Appendix]

• GENE: Global Event Network Embedding
  Qi Zeng, Manling Li, Tuan Lai, Heng Ji, Mohit Bansal, Hanghang Tong
  NAACL 2021 (TextGraphs-15 Workshop)
  [PDF] [Code]

2020

• GAIA at SM-KBP 2020 - A Dockerlized Multi-media Multi-lingual Knowledge Extraction, Clustering, Temporal Tracking and Hypothesis Generation System
  Manling Li, Ying Lin, Tuan Manh Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Haoyang Wen, Lifu Huang, Zhenhailong Wang, Pengfei Yu, Di Lu, Qingyun Wang, Haoran Zhang, Qi Zeng, Chi Han, Zixuan Zhang, Yujia Qin, Xiaodan Hu, Nikolaus Parulian, Daniel Campos, Heng Ji, Alireza Zareian, Hassan Akbari, Brian Chen, Bo Wu, Emily Allaway, Shih-Fu Chang, Kathleen McKeown, Yixiang Yao, Jennifer Chen, Eric Berquist, Kexuan Sun, Xujun Peng, Ryan Gabbard, Marjorie Freedman, Pedro Szekely, T.K. Satish Kumar, Arka Sadhu, Haidong Zhu, Ram Nevatia, Miguel Rodriguez, Yifan Wang, Yang Bai, Ali Sadeghian, Daisy Zhe Wang
  TAC 2020 (Text Analysis Conference)
  [PDF]

• ReviewRobot: Explainable Paper Review Generation based on Knowledge Synthesis
  Qingyun Wang, Qi Zeng, Lifu Huang, Kevin Knight, Heng Ji, Nazneen Fatema Rajani
  INLG 2020
  [PDF] [Code]

• Connecting the Dots: Event Graph Schema Induction with Path Language Modeling
  Manling Li, Qi Zeng, Ying Lin, Kyunghyun Cho, Heng Ji, Jonathan May, Nathanael Chambers, Clare Voss
  EMNLP 2020
  [PDF] [Code]

• Cross-media Structured Common Space for Multimedia Event Extraction.
  Manling Li*, Alireza Zareian*, Qi Zeng, Spencer Whitehead, Di Lu, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang
  ACL 2020
  [PDF] [Code]

2019

• LexicalAT: Lexical-Based Adversarial Reinforcement Training for Robust Sentiment Classification
  Jingjing Xu, Liang Zhao, Hanqi Yan, Qi Zeng, Yun Liang, Xu Sun
  EMNLP 2019
  [PDF] [Code]

• Asking Clarification Questions in Knowledge-Based Question Answering
  Jingjing Xu, Yuechen Wang, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Pengcheng Yang, Qi Zeng, Ming Zhou, Xu Sun
  EMNLP 2019
  [PDF] [Code]

• Review-Driven Multi-Label Music Style Classification by Exploiting Style Correlations
  Jingjing Xu*, Guangxiang Zhao*, Qi Zeng, Xuancheng Ren, Xu Sun
  NAACL 2019
  [PDF] [Code]

• Text Assisted Insight Ranking Using Context-Aware Memory Network
  Qi Zeng*, Liangchen Luo*, Wenhao Huang, Yang Tang
  AAAI 2019
  [PDF] [Poster]

• Learning Personalized End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog
  Liangchen Luo, Wenhao Huang, Qi Zeng, Xu Sun, Zaiqing Nie
  AAAI 2019
  [PDF] [Poster]

2018

• An Auto-Encoder Matching Model for Learning Utterance-Level Semantic Dependency in Dialogue Generation
  Jingjing Xu*, Liangchen Luo*, Junyang Lin, Qi Zeng, Xu Sun
  EMNLP 2018 (Short Paper)
  [PDF] [CODE] [Poster]

• A Skeleton-Based Model for Promoting Coherence in Narrative Story Generation
  Jingjing Xu, Xuancheng Ren, Yi Zhang, Qi Zeng, Xiaoyan Cai, Xu Sun
  EMNLP 2018
  [PDF] [CODE]

• Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation Using Cycled Reinforcement Learning
  Jingjing Xu, Xu Sun, Qi Zeng, Xuancheng Ren, Xiaodong Zhang, Houfeng Wang, Wenjie Li
  ACL 2018
  [PDF] [CODE] [SLIDES]

Mentorship

• Shitong Dai, BS@RUC, 2023
• Mankeerat Singh Sidhu, BS@UIUC, 2023
• Qiusi Zhan, MS@UIUC, 2022

Office: Room 1115, Siebel Center for Computer Science, 201 N. Goodwin Ave, Urbana, IL 61801