Professor William Wang receives 2019 IBM Faculty Award Pofessor William wang receives 2019 IBM Faculty Award

Professor William Wang has received the 2019 IBM Faculty award. For three years, he has worked with IBM Research on Information Extraction and Natural language Processing research.This year has been a particularly fruitful year for the UCSB-IBM partnership with five main conference papers accepted to NAACL and ACL, which are premier venues for Natural Language Processing research. Fundamental breakthroughs have been made in developing new techniques, models, and datasets for ultrafine-grained entity typing, lifelong relation extraction, joint KB+text question answering, Twitter question answering, and self-supervised summarization. The five papers are as follows:

Hong Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang, and William Yang Wang, "Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction", in Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019), long paper, Minneapolis, MN, USA, June 3-5, ACL. Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Deren Lei, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, and William Yang Wang, "Imposing Label-Relational Inductive Bias for Extremely Fine-Grained Entity Typing", in Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019), long paper, Minneapolis, MN, USA, June 3-5, ACL. Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo and William Yang Wang, ``Improving Question Answering over Incomplete KBs with Knowledge-Aware Reader", in Proceedings of The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019), full paper, Florence, Italy, July 28th - August 2nd, ACL. Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang and William Yang Wang, "TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset", in Proceedings of The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019), full paper, Florence, Italy, July 28th - August 2nd, ACL. Hong Wang, Xin Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Mo Yu, Xiaoxiao Guo, Shiyu Chang and William Yang Wang, "Self-Supervised Learning for Contextualized Extractive Summarization", in Proceedings of The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019), full paper, Florence, Italy, July 28th - August 2nd, ACL.

Their partnership with IBM has resulted in a total of seven high-quality papers at leading AI and NLP conferences.

Congratulations on another successful year! We are excited to follow your research with your continued partnership with IBM research!