I am an Assistant Research Professor at the USC Department of Computer Science. My research focuses on data-driven machine learning approaches for processing structured data, and knowledge acquisition from unstructured data. Particularly, I am interested in developing knowledge-aware learning systems with generalizability and requiring minimal supervision, and with concrete applications to natural language understanding, knowledge base construction, computational biology and medicine. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dan Roth at UPenn. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from UCLA in 2019, where I worked with Carlo Zaniolo, Kai-Wei Chang and Wei Wang. Before joining UCLA as a Ph.D. student, I graduated with a Bachelor degree from Fudan University in 2014 where I worked with X. Sean Wang.

I direct the Language Understanding and Knolwedge Acquisition (LUKA) Lab. Our research focuses on data-driven machine learning approaches for Natural Language Processing (information extraction, knowledge acquisition, natural language inference, multilingualism), Knowledge Technologies (KBC, knowledge transfer, structured inference, commonsense inference), and AI for the common good (applications to biology, medicine, healthcare). Our long-term goal is to develop robust, generalizable and minimally supervised knowledge-aware learning systems that help machines understand nature. A list of recent research topics can be found on our group website at here: https://luka-group.github.io/research.html.

2021 NSF CRII Award
2020 ACM SIGBio BCB Best Student Paper Award
2019 UCLA Dissertation Fellowship