Yifu Qiu

Yifu Qiu

PhD student in Natural Language Processing

University of Edinburgh

University of Cambridge

Biography

The vision of my research is to understand the underlying mechanism of human intelligence from both the neural and cogintive perspectives, and finally approach the grand goal of building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). More specifically, I research this broad question: “how can we teach the machine to acquire language ability?”, also as known as Natural Language Processing (NLP).

I recently work on the crosslingual language generation which challenges recent pretrained language models on three fundamental aspects:

  1. Systematic Generalization
  2. Few-shot Learning
  3. Learning for Relational Knowledge (e.g., physical-world knowledge)

I pursue my doctoral studies at the Institute of Language, Cognition and Computation at University of Edinburgh and Language Technology Lab at University of Cambridge, and I am fortunated to be advised by Shay Cohen, Anna Korhonen and Edoardo Ponti under ELLIS PhD & PostDoc program, a pan-European network of excellence in AI research. I am also a member of EdinburghNLP.

Prior to starting my PhD, I spent time at Baidu NLP as a Research Intern where I worked on Open-domain Question Answering and Dense Retrieval. I obtained my MSc from University of Edinburgh and worked on text summarization and structured prediction.

Download my resumé.

Interests
  • Summarization
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Open-domain Question Answering
Education
  • PhD in Natural Language Processing, 2022-2026

    University of Edinburgh/Cambridge

  • MSc in Cognitive Science, 2020-2021

    University of Edinburgh

  • BSc in Computer Science, 2016-2020

    BNU-HKBU United International College

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
PhD Student in Natural Language Processing
Univeristy of Edinburgh/Cambridge
Oct 2022 – Present Edinburgh/Cambridge, UK
 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern in Natural Language Processing
Baidu, Inc.
Nov 2021 – Aug 2022 Beijing, China
 
 
 
 
 
MSc in Cognitive Science
University of Edinburgh
Sep 2020 – Aug 2021 Edinburgh, UK
 
 
 
 
 
BSc in Computer Science
BNU-HKBU UIC
Sep 2016 – Aug 2020 Zhuhai, China

Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
(2022). DuReader-retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine. In EMNLP 2022.

PDF Cite Code Dataset