Weiyan Shi

Welcome! I am an assistant professor at Northeastern University, jointly appointed by ECE and Khoury CS. I work on Natural Language Processing and specifically persuasive dialogues. I graduated with my PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Zhou Yu. I spent one year as a Postdoc at Stanford NLP, working with Prof. Diyi Yang. Previously, I completed my master’s degree in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley and my B.S. in Mathematics from Renmin University of China. I have worked in the SF bay area as a full-time data scientist on customer service chatbots for two years before starting my PhD.

Email: we.shi at northeastern.edu

Google Scholar

Links: Research Overview / Updates / Awards / Papers / Teaching / Services / Miscellaneous

Research Overview

My research interests are in Natural Language Processing, especially persuasive dialogue systems 🤖 and the following directions:

My research vision is to build a natural interface between human intelligence and machine intelligence via natural conversations, so that all members of society can interact with AI models seamlessly regardless of their backgrounds.

Updates

Sept 2024: Excited to be named as 35 Innovators under 35 by MIT Tech Review!

Aug 2024: We got TWO paper awards at ACL this year!

Jan 2024: Checkout our new papers on how to persuade LLMs to jailbreak them with a success rate of 92%, and how to persuade them to believe in misinformation!

July 2023: Checkout CHATS’ lab’s first project, KokoMind

Jan 2023: Our Cicero work made it into the New York Times front page!

Nov 2022: Check out our Science publication on the first human-level negotiation AI agent that can negotiate, persuade, and coordinate with human players in natural language in the classic complex 7-player board game of Diplomacy! This tackles several challenges such as multi-party dialogue modeling, strategic reasoning, social influence and how to connect them in intense and length conversations! [Meta AI blog post] [code] [Commentary in Science News]

Oct 2022: I am excited to be named as Rising Stars in Machine Learning, 2022! Thanks UMD :)

Oct 2022: Our paper on privacy-preserving Transformer-based models is accepted to EMNLP 2022.

Sep 2022: I am co-teaching Conversational AI (COMS 6998) with Zhou at Columbia.

Jun - Sep 2022: This summer I interned with Jason Weston and Jing Xu to incorporate human feedback to continuously improve deployed chatbots (checkout our paper).

Jun - Dec 2021: Finished my internship with Mike Lewis on zero-shot dialogue nonsense detection.

Jun - Dec 2020: Finished my internship with Mike Lewis on strategic dialogue.

Awards

Papers

Google Scholar

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

Preprints

Teaching

  • Co-instructor, Conversational AI Special Topics (COMS 6998)
    Columbia Universty, Fall 2022

  • Guest Lecturer (on Dialogue Systems), Natural Language Processing
    Columbia Universty, Spring 2022

  • Teaching Assistant, Conversational AI Special Topics (COMS 6998)
    Columbia University, Spring 2021

Services

  • Area Chair, Women in Machine Learning 2022, NeurIPS 2022

  • Publicity Chair, The 4th Workshop for Conversational AI, ACL 2022

  • Conference reviewer: ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, *SEM, ICLR, AAAI, NeurlPS, ICML, CHI, NLPCC, ACL Rolling Review

  • Journal reviewer: ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, Neurocomputing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems