Piji Li (李丕绩)

Senior Researcher
Tencent AI Lab
Email: lipiji.pz AT gmail.com, [Google Scholar], [Github], [Weibo]

---

Biography

I am a senior researcher at Tencent AI Lab. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Wai Lam. Before joining CUHK, I was a full-time R&D Engineer at Baidu Inc. and Wumii Inc. I received my master and bachelor degree from School of Computer Science and Technology in Shandong University from 2005 to 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Jun Ma.

I have interests in several broad research directions, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning.

---

News

• May. 2021: Three papers got accepted to ACL2021.
• Feb. 2021: Invited to serve as the Associate Editor (AE) of Neurocomputing.
• Jan. 2021: One paper got accepted to EACL2021.
• Dec. 2020: Invited to serve as the program committee for KDD 2021.
• Dec. 2020: One paper got accepted to ECIR2021.
• Dec. 2020: Invited to serve as the program committee for ICML 2021.
• Dec. 2020: One paper got accepted to AAAI2021.
• Nov. 2020: Invited to serve as the Senior Program Committee (SPC) for IJCAI 2021.
• Nov. 2020: Invited to serve as the program committee for SIGIR 2021.
• Mar. 2020: Invited to serve as the summarization track Area Chair for EMNLP 2020.

---

Working Experience

• Senior Researcher, Tencent AI Lab, 2018-08-02 ~ Now
• Co-Founder, LpNorm, 2016-02-22
• Part-time R&D Engineer, 4Paradigm, 2015
• Full-time R&D Engineer, Wumii, 2013-2014
• Full-time R&D Engineer, Baidu, 2012-2013

---

Publications

[Google Scholar]

• Piji Li and Shuming Shi. Tail-to-Tail Non-Autoregressive Sequence Prediction for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction. The 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'21). Aug. 2021. [PDF]
• Wang Chen, Piji Li and Irwin King. A Training-free and Reference-free Summarization Evaluation Metric via Centrality-weighted Relevance and Self-referenced Redundancy. The 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'21). Aug. 2021. [PDF]
• Dong Wang, Ning Ding (equal contribution with Dong), Piji Li^* and Hai-Tao Zheng^*. CLINE: Contrastive Learning with Semantic Negative Examples for Natural Language Understanding. The 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'21). Aug. 2021. [PDF]
• Wei Wang, Piji Li and Hai-Tao Zheng. Generating Diversified Comments via Reader-Aware Topic Modeling and Saliency Detection. The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'21). Feb. 2021. [PDF]
• Wei Wang, Piji Li and Hai-Tao Zheng. Consistency and Coherency Enhanced Story Generation. The 43rd edition of the annual BCS-IRSG European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR'21). Apr. 2021. [PDF]
• Qintong Li, Piji Li, Xinyi Li, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren and Maarten de Rijke. Abstractive Opinion Tagging. The 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'21). Mar. 2021. [PDF]
• Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Yan Wang, David Vandyke, Simon Baker, Piji Li and Nigel Collier. Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models. The 2021 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'21). Apr. 2021. [PDF]
• Ruize Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Ying Cheng, Piji Li, Haijun Shan, Ji Zhang, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang. Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication. The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'20). Dec. 2020. [PDF]
• Yifan Gao, Piji Li, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Michael Lyu and Irwin King. Dialogue Generation on Infrequent Sentence Functions via Structured Meta-Learning. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'20). Findings of EMNLP. Nov. 2020. [PDF]
• Xin Li, Piji Li, Yan Wang, Xiaojiang Liu, and Wai Lam. Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Multi-Level Contrastive Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.09147. Sep. 2020. [PDF]
• Qintong Li, Piji Li, Zhumin Chen, and Zhaochun Ren. Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Knowledge Enhancing and Emotion Dependency Modeling. arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.09708. Sep. 2020. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Haisong Zhang, Xiaojiang Liu, and Shuming Shi. Rigid Formats Controlled Text Generation. The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'20). Jul. 2020. [PDF] [Code]
• Wang Chen, Hou Pong Chan, Piji Li, and Irwin King. Exclusive Hierarchical Decoding for Deep Keyphrase Generation. The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'20). Jul. 2020. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Lidong Bing, Zhongyu Wei, and Wai Lam. Salience Estimation with Multi-Attention Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.03589. Apr. 2020. [PDF]
• Piji Li. An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.04195. Mar. 2020. [PDF]
• Minghong Xu, Piji Li^*, Haoran Yang, Pengjie Ren, Zhaochun Ren^*, Zhumin Chen and Jun Ma. A Neural Topical Expansion Framework for Unstructured Persona-oriented Dialogue Generation. The 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'20). June. 2020. [PDF]
• Xin Li, Piji Li, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, and Wai Lam. Relevance-Promoting Language Model for Short-Text Conversation. Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'20). Feb. 2020. [PDF]
• Ruize Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Piji Li, Qi Zhang, and Xuanjing Huang. Storytelling from an Image Stream using Scene Graphs. Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'20). Feb. 2020. [PDF]
• Mingyue Shang, Piji Li, Zhenxin Fu, Lidong Bing, Dongyan Zhao, Shuming Shi, and Rui Yan. Semi-supervised Text Style Transfer: Cross Projection in Latent Space. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'19). Nov. 2019. [PDF] [Data]
• Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li, Zhangming Chan, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan. How to Write Summaries with Patterns? Learning towards Abstractive Summarization through Prototype Editing. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'19). Nov. 2019. [PDF]
• Zihao Wang, Kwunping Lai, Piji Li, Lidong Bing, and Wai Lam. Tackling Long-Tailed Relations and Uncommon Entities in Knowledge Graph Completion. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'19). Nov. 2019. [PDF]
• Xin Shen, Wai Lam, Xunying Liu, Piji Li. Compressive Multi-document Summarization with Sense-level Concepts. IJCAI-Tusion Workshop 2019. Aug. 2019. [PDF]
• Yifan Gao, Piji Li, Irwin King, and Michael R. Lyu. Interconnected Question Generation with Coreference Alignment and Conversation Flow Modeling. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'19). Jul. 2019. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Zihao Wang, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam. Persona-Aware Tips Generation. Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW'19). May. 2019. [PDF]
• Wang Chen, Hou Pong Chan, Piji Li, Lidong Bing, Irwin King. An Integrated Approach for Keyphrase Generation via Exploring thePower of Retrieval and Extraction. Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL'19). Jun. 2019. [PDF]
• Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li, Lidong Bing, Zhaochun Ren, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan. Abstractive Text Summarization by Incorporating Reader Comments. Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'19). Jan. 2019. [PDF]
• Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Piji Li, Wai Lam. A Unified Model for Opinion Target Extraction and Target Sentiment Prediction. Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'19). Jan. 2019. [PDF]
• Yifan Gao, Lidong Bing, Piji Li, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu. Generating Distractors for Reading Comprehension Questions from Real Examinations. Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'19). Jan. 2019. [PDF]
• Yi Liao, Lidong Bing, Piji Li, Shuming Shi, Wai Lam, and Tong Zhang. QuaSE: Accurate Text Style Transfer under Quantifiable Guidance. The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'18). 2018. [PDF]
• Zhihao Fan, Zhongyu Wei, Piji Li, Yanyan Lan, and Xuanjing Huang. A Question Type Driven Framework to Diversify Visual Question Generation. Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'18). Stockholm, Sweden. 2018.
• Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Piji Li, Wai Lam, and Zhimou Yang. Aspect Term Extraction with History Attention and Selective Transformation. Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'18). Stockholm, Sweden. 2018.
• Piji Li, Lidong Bing, and Wai Lam. Actor-Critic based Training Framework for Abstractive Summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.11070 (2018). Mar 2018. [PDF]
• Lidong Bing, Zheng-Yu Niu, Piji Li, Wai Lam, and Haifeng Wang. Learning a Unified Embedding Space of Web Search from Large-scale Query Log. Knowledge-Based Systems. 2018.
• Piji Li. Optimization Algorithms for Deep Learning. Jul 2017. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Wai Lam, Lidong Bing, and Zihao Wang. Deep Recurrent Generative Decoder for Abstractive Text Summarization. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'17). Sep 2017. [PDF] [Code]
• Piji Li, Wai Lam, Lidong Bing, Weiwei Guo, and Hang Li. Cascaded Attention based Unsupervised Information Distillation for Compressive Summarization. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'17). Sep 2017. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam. Reader-Aware Multi-Document Summarization: An Enhanced Model and The First Dataset. Proceedings of the EMNLP 2017 Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization (EMNLP-NewSum'17). Sep 2017. [PDF] [Dataset] [Code]
• Piji Li, Zihao Wang, Zhaochun Ren, Lidong Bing, and Wai Lam. Neural Rating Regression with Abstractive Tips Generation for Recommendation. Proceedings of the The 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'17). Aug 2017. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Zihao Wang, Wai Lam, Zhaochun Ren, and Lidong Bing. Salience Estimation via Variational Auto-Encoders for Multi-Document Summarization. Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'17). Feb 2017. [PDF] [Code]
• Hongya Song, Zhaochun Ren, Piji Li, Shangsong Liang, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Summarizing Answers in Non-Factoid Community Question-Answering. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'17). Feb 2017.
• Zhaochun Ren, Shangsong Liang, Piji Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Maarten de Rijke. Social Collaborative Viewpoint Regression with Explainable Recommendations. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'17). Feb 2017.
• Zhaochun Ren, Hongya Song, Piji Li, Shangsong Liang, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke. Using Sparse Coding for Answer Summarization in Non-Factoid Community Question-Answering. Proceedings of the SIGIR 2016 workshop: Web Question Answering, Beyond Factoids (WebQA '17). Jun 2016.
• Lidong Bing, Piji Li, Yi Liao, Wai Lam, Weiwei Guo, Rebecca J Passonneau. Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization via Phrase Selection and Merging. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'15). Beijing, China. July 26-31, 2015.
• Piji Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam, Hang Li and Yi Liao. Reader-Aware Multi-Document Summarization via Sparse Coding. Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'15). Buenos Aires, Argentina. July 25-31, 2015. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Jun Ma, Shuai Gao. Learning to summarize web image and text mutually. Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR'12). Hong Kong. Jun 2012. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Jun Ma, Dongmei Zhang, Xiaohui Han. Extraction and Ranking of Tags for User Opinions. Journal of Chinese Information Processing. 2012. PDF]
• Chaoran Cui, Jun Ma, Lei Zhang, Piji Li, Zhaochun Ren. A hybrid relevant-diverse approach for image re-ranking with multiple features. International Journal of Computer Mathematics. 2011.
• Piji Li, Jun Ma, Lei Zhang. Results selection diversity for web image retrieval. International Journal of Computer Mathematics. 2011.
• Piji Li, Jun Ma. What is happening in a still picture? Proceedings of the The First Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR'11). Beijing, China. Dec 2011. [PDF]
• Piji Li, Jun Ma, Shuai Gao. Actions in still web images: visualization, detection and retrieval. Proceedings of the International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM'11). Sep 2011.
• Lei Zhang, Jun Ma, Chaoran Cui, Piji Li. Active learning through notes data in flickr: an effortless training data acquisition approach for object localization. Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR'11). Trento , Italy. Apr. 2011.
• Lei Zhang, Piji Li, Jun Ma. A hybrid unsupervised image re-ranking approach with latent topic contents. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR'10). Jul 2010.
• Piji Li, Lei Zhang, Jun Ma. Dual-ranking for web image retrieval. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR'10). Jul 2010.
• Piji Li, Jun Ma. Learning to rank for web image retrieval based on genetic programming. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Broadband Network & Multimedia Technology (BNMT'09). Oct 2009.

---

PhD Thesis

• Piji Li. Neural Text Summarization and Generation. CUHK. July 2018. [PDF]

---

Professional Service

• Area Chair/Senior Program Committee (SPC):
  • EMNLP 2020 (Summarization)
  • IJCAI 2021 (Summarization)
• Associate Editor (AE):
  • Neurocomputing (2021~)
• Program Committee/Reviewing:
  • ICML, NIPS, AAAI, IJCAI
  • ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AACL, CCL, NLPCC
  • SIGIR, CIKM, WSDM, CCIR
  • TACL, CL, TOIS, TKDE, JCST, IRJ
• Session Chair: EMNLP 2020, ICONIP 2020

---

Resources

• Dataset:
  • RA-MDS: Reader-Aware Multi-Document Summarization [link ]
• Code: https://github.com/lipiji

---

Last update: May, 2021.