About me

Hi there! My name is Xinyan Yu (余忻妍), you can also call me Velocity :).

I am a research fellow at University of Southern California. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Dani Yogatama. Prior to USC, I received my B.S. degree in Computer Science (departmental honor) and in Data Science and Statistics under the Applied and Computational Mathematical Science, and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. I used to work with Prof. Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Prof. Luke Zettlemoyer, and mentored by the very best Akari Asai, Sewon Min and Jungo Kasai.I have also been an AI resident at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Labs.

My current research interests lie in machine learning and natural language processing, specifically natural language understanding and reasoning, multilingual NLP, controlled generation, and probablistic graphical models.

I spent some time doing software engineering at some companies. In Fall 2021, I was at the FAM (Facebook Ads) Ranking team at Meta where I implement versioning systems for experiments and multi-armed bandits selection optimization strategies. In Summer 2021, I was an intern at the search features team at Pinterest where I worked on a new user search feature based on the topics users have expressed interests in. Back in 2020, I spent a summer at Microsoft Azure Networking on the OnE (open network emulator) team where I added a pipeline to the network verification system.

I am happy to answer any questions and chat about research/collaboration! Reach me at [first_name][initial_of_last_name]@usc.edu.

News

• 2023.09: Our Real-time QA have been accepted at NeurIPS 2023 Dataset track.
• 2023.07: Attended ACL 2023 with CREPE being featured as an oral presentation!
• 2023.05: Two papers accepted to ACL 2023! See you in Toronto!
• 2022.11: Checkout my newest preprint with Sewon: CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositions about false presuppositions in long-form question answering datasets!
• 2022.09: Our multilingual dataset survey paper has been accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2022!
• 2022.07: I start my AI residency at Meta AI Seattle.
• 2021.10: My summer internship project of topic-based user search for the profiles tab at Pinterest is featured in this press release! Ctrl/Cmd + F “Profiles” to see it in screenshots.
• 2021.9: Our CORA paper has been accepted to NeurIPS 2021.

Misc

• The reason I am particularly interested in multilinguality is because I am multilingual myself. I can speak Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, a little bit of German, and a little bit of Spanish. I am learning Cantonese and Shanghainese, too.

• I come from Chongqing, China, a city that is famous for spicy foods, mountains and cyberpunk sceneries. Kevin Deng is my favorite cameraman who did a really great job picturing Chongqing.