Weiyan Shi

Welcome! I just graduated with my PhD degree in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Zhou Yu, working on Natural Language Processing. 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.

I am joining Stanford NLP as a postdoc for 2023-2024 and Northeastern University as a tenure-track assistant professor in Fall 2024. If you are interested in working with me, feel free to send me an email :)

Email: ws2634@columbia.edu

Google Scholar / CV / Research Statement / Teaching Statement

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

Research Overview

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

• Interactive systems specialized in social influence for social good (e.g., persuasive dialogues): [ACL 2019], [CHI 2020], [AAAI 2020], [EMNLP 2020a], [EMNLP 2020b], [EMNLP 2021], [AACL 2022], [New preprint], [Science]
• Privacy-preserving NLP models: [NAACL 2021], [EMNLP 2022]
• Task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems: [ACL 2018], [NAACL 2019], [EMNLP 2019], [EMNLP 2020], [ACL 2021], [New preprint]
• Intelligible dialogue generation: [EMNLP 2021] [New preprint]
• Learning through interaction: [New preprint]

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. Glad we are going in that direction with ChatGPT!

Research Statement

Updates

2023: Talk “Interactive AI Systems Specialized in Social Influence” at the University of Hawaii (2023/01), Rice (2023/01), Northwestern Stats and Data Science (2023/01), ASU (2023/02), Purdue (2023/02), CMU (2023/02), Northeastern (2023/03), UW-Madison i-School (2023/03), PSU (2023/03), Cornell Tech (2023/04), NYU (2023/05), Stanford NLP (2023/06).

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

• Rising Stars in Machine Learning, 2022
• Best Paper Nomination, ACL 2019
• Dean’s Distinguished PhD Fellowship
• Department Citation (top 1), UC Berkeley, 2016
• Speaker at Department Commencement (top 1), UC Berkeley, 2016
• National Scholarship, 2014
• Presidential Fellowship for Studying Abroad, 2013

Papers

Google Scholar

2022

• Human-Level Play in the Game of Diplomacy by Combining Language Models with Strategic Reasoning
  FAIR, Anton Bakhtin*, Noam Brown*, Emily Dinan*, Gabriele Farina, Colin Flaherty*, Daniel Fried, Andrew Goff, Jonathan Gray*, Hengyuan Hu*, Athul Paul Jacob*, Mojtaba Komeili, Karthik Konath, Minae Kwon, Adam Lerer*, Mike Lewis*, Alexander H. Miller*, Sasha Mitts, Adithya Renduchintala*, Stephen Roller, Dirk Rowe, Weiyan Shi*, Joe Spisak, Alexander Wei, David Wu*, Hugh Zhang*, Markus Zijlstra
  (*A member of the core research team. Authors listed alphabetically.)
  Science 2022, [Meta AI blog post], [code]
  Commentary in Science News by Matthew Hutson, Yoram Bachrach, Noam Brown, Jonathan Gratch, and Zhou Yu
  New York Times (front page)
  Selected media coverage: New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, Forbes
  

• Just Fine-tune Twice: Selective Differential Privacy for Large Language Models
  Weiyan Shi, Ryan Shea, Si Chen, Chiyuan Zhang, Ruoxi Jia, Zhou Yu
  EMNLP 2022, code and data
  

• Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialogue
  Maximillian Chen, Weiyan Shi, Feifan Yan, Ryan Hou, Jingwen Zhang, Saurav Sahay, Zhou Yu
  AACL 2022
  

• Selective Differential Privacy for Language Modeling
  Weiyan Shi, Aiqi Cui, Evan Li, Ruoxi Jia, Zhou Yu
  NAACL 2022, code and data, talk
  

2021

• Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration
  Weiyan Shi, Yu Li, Saurav Sahay, Zhou Yu
  EMNLP 2021 Findings, code
  

• LEGOEval: An Open-Source Toolkit for Dialogue System Evaluation via Crowdsourcing
  Yu Li, Josh Arnold, Feifan Yan, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu
  ACL 2021 Demo, code, demo
  

• PRAL: A tailored pre-training model for task-oriented dialogue generation
  Jing Gu, Qingyang Wu, Chongruo Wu, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu
  ACL 2021, talk
  

2020

• INSPIRED: Toward Sociable Recommendation Dialogue Systems
  Shirley Anugrah Hayati, Dongyeop Kang, Qingxiaoyang Zhu, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu
  EMNLP 2020, code and data, talk
  

• Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction
  Liang Qiu, Yizhou Zhao, Weiyan Shi, Yuan Liang, Feng Shi, Tao Yuan, Zhou Yu, Song-Chun Zhu
  EMNLP 2020, code, talk
  

• Understanding User Resistance Strategies in Persuasive Conversations
  Youzhi Tian, Weiyan Shi, Chen Li, Zhou Yu
  EMNLP 2020 Findings
  

• Effects of Persuasive Dialogues: Testing Bot Identities and Inquiry Strategies
  Weiyan Shi, Xuewei Wang,Yoo Jung Oh, Jingwen Zhang, Saurav Sahay, Zhou Yu
  CHI 2020, talk
  

• End-to-End Trainable Non-Collaborative Dialogue Systems
  Yu Li, Kun Qian, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu
  AAAI 2020, code
  

2019

• How to Build User Simulators to Train RL-based Dialogue Systems
  Weiyan Shi*, Kun Qian(equal contribution), Xuewei Wang, Zhou Yu
  *EMNLP 2019, code
  

• Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good
  Xuewei Wang*, Weiyan Shi*(equal contribution), Richard Kim, Yoojung Oh, Sijia Yang, Jingwen Zhang, Zhou Yu
  ACL 2019, code and data, talk, Best Paper Nomination
  

• Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Learning
  Weiyan Shi, Tiancheng Zhao, Zhou Yu
  NAACL 2019, code
  

2018

• Sentiment Adaptive End-to-End Dialogue Systems
  Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu
  ACL 2018, data
  

Preprints

• AutoReply: Detecting Nonsense in Dialogue Introspectively with Discriminative Replies
  Weiyan Shi, Emily Dinan, Adi Renduchintala, Daniel Fried, Athul Paul Jacob, Zhou Yu, Mike Lewis
  arXiv, 2022
  

• When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Cherryade: Converting Feedback from Bad Responses into Good Labels
  Weiyan Shi, Emily Dinan, Kurt Shuster, Jason Weston*, Jing Xu*(equal contribution)
  arXiv, 2022
  

• Social Influence Dialogue Systems: A Scoping Survey of the Efforts Towards Influence Capabilities of Dialogue Systems
  Kushal Chawla*, Weiyan Shi*(equal contribution), Jingwen Zhang**, Gale Lucas**, Zhou Yu**, Jonathan Gratch**(co-supervision)
  arXiv, 2022
  

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