Yifei Yuan (袁一菲)

Yifei Yuan (袁一菲)

Current Postdoc at University of Copenhagen, Previous PhD at the CUHK Text Mining Group

Yifei Yuan

Contact: yfyuan01@gmail.com

Bio

I am currently a postdoc fellow at Coastal NLP group at University of Copenhagen, working with Prof. Anders Søgaard. I obtained my PhD degree in October 2023 at CUHK text mining group, supervised by Prof.Lam Wai. I obtained my bachelor’s degree at Harbin Institute of Technology in 2019, majoring in bioinformatics.

Currently, my research interest focuses on multimodal information retrieval and text mining problems, including social media based fashion analysis, multimodal dialogue systems, etc. I’m also interested in other aspects of NLP and IR in the multimodal domain.

Research Interests:

  • Multimodal Information Retrieval
  • Conversational IR
  • Image-text based Multimodal NLP
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Machine Learning

Selected Publications

  • Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answering.
    Yifei Yuan, Yang Deng, Anders Søgaard, Mohammad Aliannejadi.
    Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (Full Paper, EMNLP 2024)

  • FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture.
    Wenyan Li, Xinyu Zhang, Jiaang Li, …, Yifei Yuan, Anders Søgaard, Daniel Hershcovich, Desmond Elliott.
    Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (Full Paper, EMNLP 2024)

  • Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics.
    Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Yifei Yuan, Jiahuan Pei, JIA-HONG HUANG and Evangelos Kanoulas.
    Proceedings of the 17th International Natural Language Generation Conference (Full Paper, INLG 2024)

  • On the Multi-turn Instruction Following for Conversational Web Agents.
    Yang Deng, Xuan Zhang, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua.
    Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. (Full Paper, ACL 2024)

  • CO3: Low-resource Contrastive Co-training for Generative Conversational Query Rewrite.
    Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Runze Wang, Liyi Chen, Renjun Hu, Zengming Zhang, Feijun Jiang, Wai Lam. Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation. (Full Paper, COLING 2024)

  • Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search.
    Yifei Yuan, Clemencia Siro, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke, Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference, 2024. (Full Paper, WWW 2024)

  • Let the LLMs Talk: Simulating Human-to-Human Conversational QA via Zero-Shot LLM-to-LLM Interactions.
    Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Yifei Yuan, Evangelos Kanoulas, Mohammad Aliannejadi.
    Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 2024. (Full Paper, WSDM 2024)

  • Social Media Fashion Knowledge Extraction as Captioning.
    Yifei Yuan, Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Wai Lam.
    Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region. (Full Paper, SIGIR-AP 2023)

  • Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations.
    Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. (Full Paper, ACL 2023)

  • MCqueen: a benchmark for multimodal conversational query rewrite.
    Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Runze Wang, Liyi Chen, Feijun Jiang, Yuan You, Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (Full Paper, EMNLP 2022)

  • Sentiment Analysis of Fashion Related Posts in Social Media.
    Yifei Yuan and Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 2022. (Full Paper, WSDM 2022)

  • Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation.
    Wenxuan Zhang, Yang Deng, Xin Li, Yifei Yuan, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. (Full Paper, EMNLP 2021)

  • Conversational Fashion Image Retrieval via Multiturn Natural Language Feedback.
    Yifei Yuan and Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2021. (Full Paper, SIGIR 2021)

  • Point-of-Interest Oriented Question Answering with Joint Inference of Semantic Matching and Distance Correlation.
    Yifei Yuan, Jingbo Zhou, and Wai Lam.
    Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2020. (Full Paper, AACL 2020)

Professional Activity

Reviewer and PC members: ACL, SIGIR, KDD, NAACL, WWW, COLING, CIKM, EACL, TOIS, ACM Computing Surverys, …

Invited Talk

  • LLM-based Clarification in Conversational Search: Going beyond Unimodality and System Performance.
    NLP-SIG workshop in NUS, Singapore, May 2024
  • Conversational IR.
    Ellis ESSIR summer school in UvA, Amsterdam, July 2024

Teaching Experience

Teaching

  • ATNLP, University of Copenhagen, 2023, Co-teaching with Desmond Elliott
  • Intelligent Interactive Systems, University of Amsterdam, 2022, Co-teaching with Frank Nack

TA

  • 2020R2-SEEM 2420 Operations Research I, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2020
  • 2020R2-SEEM 3450 Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2020
  • 2019R2-SEEM 3570 Stochastic Models, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2019
  • Special TA task force, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2019

Experiences

  • Nov 2018-May 2019 Research Intern, Bussiness Intellegence Lab, Baidu
  • Nov 2021-May 2022 Research Intern, Alibaba Group
  • Jul 2022-Mar 2023 Visiting Researcher, University of Amsterdam

For more information

More info about me can be found in CV.