Biography

I am currently an associate professor at School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NJUST). I obtained my Ph.D degree from Singapore Management University in 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Jing Jiang. My research centers around applying deep learning methods to many NLP tasks including Sentiment Analysis, Information Extraction, Question Answering, Text Summarization, etc. I am also interested in solving domain adaptation problems in NLP tasks. 

Research Interests

• • Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Information Extraction, Question Answering, Text Classification, Text Summarization, Social Media Analysis

  • Machine Learning: Supervised/Semi-supervised Learning, Deep Learning, Transfer Learning, Multi-task Learning, Multimodal Learning

Work Experience

• • Associate Professor in NJUST, Nanjing, China

  • Research Scientist in SIS, SMU, Singapore                                                                                           

  • 2018 Summer Intern in Snapchat Research, Venice, CA, USA            Mentor: Dr. Luis Marujo & Dr. William Brendel

  • 2017 Summer Intern in Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China                     Mentor: Dr. Wei Chu, Dr. Jun Huang, & Dr. Minghui Qiu.

Education

• • Ph.D., School of Information Systems, SMU                                                                                          Aug 2014 - Nov 2018

  • Master of Engineering, School of Computer Science and Engineering, NJUST               Sep 2012 - Jun 2015                      

  • Bachelor of Science, School of Computer Science and Engineering, NJUST                     Sep 2008 - Jun 2012                      

Publications [Google Scholar]

      Selected Journal Papers

• 1. IEEE TASLP 2025. Yaming Zhang, Jianfei Yu†, Wenya Wang, Li Yang, Jia Yang, and Rui Xia. Enhancing Multimodal Object-Entity Relation Extraction via Multi-Aspect Contrastive Learning in Large Multimodal Models.  In IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 33, 1220 - 1229, 2025.

  2. IEEE TAFFC 2025. Heqing Ma, Jianfei Yu†, Fanfan Wang, Hanyu Cao, and Rui Xia†. From Extraction to Generation: Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Generation in Conversations. In IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 16(2): 586-597, 2025.

  3. Language Resources and Evaluation 2025.  Hongjie Cai, Nan Song, Zengzhi Wang, Qiming Xie, Qiankun Zhao, Ke Li, Siwei Wu, Shijie Liu, Heqing Ma, Jianfei Yu, and Rui Xia. MEMD-ABSA: A Multi-Element Multi-Domain Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.  Language Resources and Evaluation (2025): 1-29. [Data]

  4. IEEE TKDE 2024. Zengzhi Wang, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. Unified ABSA via Annotation-Decoupled Multi-task Instruction Tuning. In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 36(11): 7242-7254 (2024).

  5. IP&M 2024. Li Yang, Zengzhi Wang, Ziyan Li, Jin-Cheon Na, and Jianfei Yu. An empirical study of Multimodal Entity-Based Sentiment Analysis with ChatGPT: Improving in-context learning via entity-aware contrastive learning. Information Processing and Management, 61(4), 103724, 2024. [Code]

  6. KBS 2023. Li Yang, Jieming Wang, Jin-Cheon Na, and Jianfei Yu†. Generating Paraphrase Sentences for Multimodal Entity-Category-Sentiment Triple Extraction. Knowledge-Based Systems, Volume 278 (2023), 110823. 

  7. IEEE TAFFC 2023. Fanfan Wang, Zixiang Ding, Rui Xia, Zhaoyu Li, and Jianfei Yu. Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations. In IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 14(3): 1832-1844, 2023. [Code]

  8. IEEE TAFFC 2023. Jianfei Yu*, Kai Chen*, and Rui Xia. Hierarchical Interactive Multimodal Transformer for Aspect-Based Multimodal Sentiment Analysis. In IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 14(3): 1966-1978, 2023. [Code]

  9. IP&M 2022. Li Yang, Jin-Cheon Na, and Jianfei Yu. Cross-Modal Multitask Transformer for End-to-End Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. Information Processing and Management, 59(5), 103038, 2022. [Code]

  10. IEEE/ACM TASLP 2020. Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, and Rui Xia. Entity-Sensitive Attention and Fusion Network for Entity-Level Multimodal Sentiment Classification. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 28, 429-439, 2020. [Data & Code] 

  11. IEEE/ACM TASLP 2019. Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, and Rui Xia. Global Inference for Aspect and Opinion Terms Co-Extraction Based on Multi-Task Neural Networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 27(1), 168-177, 2019.

      Selected Conference Papers ( * indicates equal contribution, † indicates corresponding author)

• 1. COLING 2025. Qiyuan He, Yizhong Wang, Jianfei Yu and Wenya Wang. Language Models over Large-Scale Knowledge Base: on Capacity, Flexibility and Reasoning for New Facts. In Proceedings of COLING 2025, pp. 1736–1753.

  2. EMNLP 2024. Yidan Sun, Jianfei Yu, and Boyang Li. Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language  Story Understanding. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2024 (Findings), pp. 13488-13504.

  3. ACMMM 2024. Wenjie Zheng, Jianfei Yu†,  and Rui Xia†. A Unimodal Valence-Arousal Driven Contrastive Learning Framework for Multimodal Multi-Label Emotion Recognition. In the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2024), pp. 622-631.

  4. ACMMM 2024. Fanfan Wang, Heqing Ma, Xiangqing Shen, Jianfei Yu†, and Rui Xia†. Observe before Generate: Emotion-Cause aware Video Caption for Multimodal Emotion Cause Generation in Conversations. In the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2024), pp. 5820-5828.

  5. ACMMM 2024. Ziyan Li, Jianfei Yu†, Jia Yang, Wenya Wang, Li Yang, and Rui Xia†. Generative Multimodal Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Multimodal Named Entity Recognition. In the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2024), pp. 7336-7345.

  6. ACL 2024. Hongjie Cai, Heqing Ma, Jianfei Yu, and Rui Xia. A Joint Coreference-aware Framework for Document-level Target Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), pp. 12149–12160.

  7. SemEval 2024. Fanfan Wang, Heqing Ma, Jianfei Yu†, Rui Xia†, and Erik Cambria. SemEval-2024 Task 3: Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024), pp. 2039–2050.

  8. EMNLP 2023.  Fanfan Wang, Jianfei Yu†, and Rui Xia†.  Generative Emotion Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations with Commonsense Knowledge. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2023 (Findings), pp. 3952-3963.

  9. EMNLP 2023.  Nan Song, Hongjie Cai, Rui Xia, Jianfei Yu, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai.  A Sequence-to-Structure Approach to Document-level Targeted Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2023 (Findings), pp. 7687-7698.

  10. ACMMM 2023. Jieming Wang, Ziyan Li, Jianfei Yu†, Li Yang, and Rui Xia. Fine-Grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding with a Generative Framework. In the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2023), pp. 3934–3943. [Code]

  11. ACL 2023. Zinong Yang, Feng Xu, Jianfei Yu, and Rui Xia. UniCOQE: Unified Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction As A Set. In Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Findings), pp. 12229–12240.

  12. ACL 2023. Debin Xiao, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. Emotion Cause Extraction on Social Media without Any Human Annotation. In Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Findings), pp. 1455–1468.

  13. ACL 2023. Wenjie Zheng, Jianfei Yu†, Rui Xia† and Shijin Wang. A Facial Expression-Aware Multimodal Multi-task Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Multi-party Conversations. In Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Main Conference), pp. 15445–15459.

  14. ACL 2023. Jianfei Yu*, Ziyan Li*, Jieming Wang, and Rui Xia. Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition on Social Media. In Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Main Conference), pp. 9141–9154. [Code]

  15. ACL 2023. Jianfei Yu*, Qiankun Zhao*, and Rui Xia. Cross-Domain Data Augmentation with Domain-Adaptive Language Modeling for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of ACL 2023 (Main Conference), pp. 1456–1470. [Code]

  16. ACL 2022. Yan Ling, Jianfei Yu†, and Rui Xia†. Vision-Language Pre-Training for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of ACL 2022, pp. 2149–2159. [Code]

  17. NAACL 2022. Junjie Li, Jianfei Yu†, and Rui Xia†. Generative Cross-Domain Data Augmentation for Aspect and Opinion Co-Extraction. In Proceedings of NAACL 2022, pp. 4219–4229. [Code]

  18. IJCAI 2022. Jianfei Yu*, Jieming Wang*, Rui Xia, and Junjie Li. Targeted Multimodal Sentiment Classification based on Coarse-to-Fine Grained Image-Target Matching. In Proceedings of IJCAI-ECAI 2022, pp. 4482–4488. [Code]

  19. EMNLP 2021. Ziheng Liu, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction from Product Reviews. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2021, pp. 3955–3965.  [Data & Code] 

  20. EMNLP 2021. Hao Chen, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. Reinforced Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Dual Sentiment Classification. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2021,  pp. 269–378.

  21. ACL 2021. Hongjie Cai, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment Quadruple Extraction with Implicit Aspects and Opinions. In Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2021,  pp. 340–350. [Data & Code] 

  22. ACL 2021. Jianfei Yu, Chenggong Gong, and Rui Xia. Cross-Domain Review Generation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (Findings), pp. 4767–4777. [Code]

  23. COLING 2020. Hongjie Cai, Xiangsheng Zhou, Yaofeng Tu, Jianfei Yu, and Rui Xia. Aspect-Category based Sentiment Analysis with Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 833–843. (Best Paper Candidate, AR: 21/2195 = 0.96%) [Code]

  24. EMNLP 2020. Zixiang Ding, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. End-to-End Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction based on Sliding Window Multi-Label Learning. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 3574–3583. [Code]

  25. EMNLP 2020. Rui Xia, Kaizhou Xuan, and Jianfei Yu†. A State-independent and Time-evolving Network for Early Rumor Detection in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 9042–9051.

  26. EMNLP 2020. Chenggong Gong*, Jianfei Yu*, and Rui Xia. Unified Feature and Instance Based Domain Adaptation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 7035–7045. [Data & Code]

  27. EMNLP 2020. Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, Ling Min Serena Khoo, Hai Leong Chieu, and Rui Xia. Coupled Hierarchical Transformer for Stance-Aware Rumor Verification in Social Media Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1392–1401. 

  28. ACL 2020. Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, Li Yang, and Rui Xia. Improving Multimodal Named Entity Recognition via Entity Span Detection with Unified Multimodal Transformer. In Proceedings of  the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3342–3352. [Data & Code] 

  29. ACL 2020. Zixiang Ding, Rui Xia, and Jianfei Yu. ECPE-2D: Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction based on Joint Two-Dimensional Representation, Interaction and Prediction. In Proceedings of  the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 3161–3170. [Code] 

  30. CIKM 2019. Yufei Tian, Jianfei Yu† and Jing Jiang. Aspect and Opinion Aware Abstractive Review Summarization with Reinforced Hard Typed Decoder. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 2061-2064.

  31. IJCAI 2019. Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang. Adapting BERT for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification. In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 5408-5414. [Data & Code] [Slides][Correct Mistakes in Equation 4 and 8]

  32. EMNLP 2018. Jianfei Yu, Luis Marujo, Jing Jiang, Pradeep Karuturi, and William Brendel.  Improving Multi-Label Emotion Classification via Sentiment Classification with Dual Attention Transfer Network. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 1097-1102. [Code]

  33. WSDM 2018. Jianfei Yu, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang, Shuangyong Song, Jun Huang, Wei Chu, and Haiqing Chen. Modelling Domain Relationships for Transfer Learning on Retrieval-Based Question Answering Systems in E-commerce.  In Proceedings of  the 11th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 682-690. (Oral, AR: 23/514 = 4.48%).

  34. AAAI 2017. Ying Ding, Jianfei Yu, and Jing Jiang. Recurrent Neural Networks with Auxiliary Labels for Cross-Domain Opinion Target Extraction. In Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 3436-3442.

  35. EMNLP 2016. Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang.  Learning Sentence Embeddings with Auxiliary Tasks for Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 236-246. [Slides][Code]

  36. COLING 2016. Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang.  Pairwise Relation Classification with Mirror Instances and a Combined Convolutional Neural Network. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 2366-2377. [Code]

  37. ACL 2015. Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang.  A Hassle-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method Using Instance Similarity Features. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 168-173. [Code]

  38. AAAI 2014. Rui Xia, Jianfei Yu, Feng Xu, and Shumei Wang. Instance-based Domain Adaptation in NLP via In-Target-Domain Logistic Approximation. In Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1600-1606.

      Tutorials

• 1. IJCAI 2019. Wenya Wang, Jianfei Yu, Sinno Jialin Pan, and Jing Jiang. Fine-Grained Opinion Mining: Current Trend and Cutting-Edge Dimensions. In Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. [Slides of Part II and Part IV by Wenya] [Slides of Part III and Part V by Jianfei]

      Ph.D. Dissertation

             Feature-Based Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing.

Professional Service

      Area Chair

• • ACL Rolling Review 2021-now

  • ACL 2024/2023, COING 2025, EMNLP 2024, NAACL 2025/2024, EACL 2024, IJCNLP-AACL 2023

      Virtual Infrastructure Committee Co-Chairs

• • ACL 2021.

      Conference Senior PC Member

• • IJCAI 2021.

      Conference PC Member

• • 2017~now: AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, EACL, NAACL, CIKM, COLING, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, NeurIPS, etc.

  • Outstanding Reviewer: EMNLP  2020, COLING 2018.

      Journal Reviewer

• • Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL 2022-2024),

  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI),

  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS),

  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE),

  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), 

  • IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC),

  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT),

  • ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP),

  • Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST),

  • Information Processing and Management (IP&M), etc.