Ning Shi (石宁)

2nd-year Ph.D. Student, Computing Science

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)

Dept. of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Updated on Apr. 25th, 2024

About Me

I am a 2nd-year Ph.D. student working with Prof. Grzegorz Kondrak at the University of Alberta, associated with Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Previously, I was a senior algorithm engineer at Alibaba Group. I received an M.S. degree in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, an M.S. degree in Applied Data Science at Syracuse University, and an M.S. degree in Management and Systems at New York University. For any research opportunity or collaboration, please feel free to get in touch.

News

04/22/2024 Three papers were accepted by *SEM 2024.

04/15/2024 Joined AI For Good Summer Lab program as a TA.

03/19/2024 Our team secured top-three positions in 16 language/track settings at SemEval 2024 Task 1!

11/29/2023 Honored to receive the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship.

10/07/2023 Excited to have our paper accepted as Oral by EMNLP 2023.

07/08/2023 Attended my first in-person conference, ACL@2023 – great to meet everyone there!

05/22/2023 Our survey paper was finally out. Check it out here!

05/01/2023 One paper was accepted by Findings of ACL 2023.

01/21/2023 Thrilled to have our paper accepted as Oral by EACL 2023.

Flashback

12/23/2022 Glad to share recent findings at the Amii AI Seminar.

10/11/2022 One paper was accepted by the Fifth BlackboxNLP in EMNLP 2022.

10/06/2022 Two papers were accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2022.

05/07/2022 Graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

08/26/2021 One paper was accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2021.

06/02/2021 One paper was accepted by Interspeech 2021.

05/12/2021 Graduated from Syracuse University.

03/18/2021 My son Yili (Elio) Shi (石熠礼) came into the world.

11/19/2020 Joined Alibaba Group as a senior algorithm engineer.

09/15/2020 One paper was accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2020.

09/01/2019 Proudly launched the Shining Lab, dedicated to researching cutting-edge innovations in AI.

07/28/2018 Joined Learnable as a machine learning engineer.

05/16/2018 Graduated from New York University.

Preprints

Michael Ogezi, Ning Shi. Optimizing Negative Prompts for Enhanced Aesthetics and Fidelity in Text-To-Image Generation. arXiv:2403.07605


[arXiv]

 

Zekun Wang, Ge Zhang, Kexin Yang, Ning Shi, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shaochun Hao, Guangzheng Xiong, Yizhi Li, Mong Yuan Sim, Xiuying Chen, Qingqing Zhu, Zhenzhu Yang, Adam Nik, Qi Liu, Chenghua Lin, Shi Wang, Ruibo Liu, Wenhu Chen, Ke Xu, Dayiheng Liu, Yike Guo, Jie Fu. 2023. Interactive Natural Language Processing. arXiv:2305.13246.


[arXiv] [Code]

Xiang Zhang, Senyu Li, Zijun Wu, Ning Shi. Lost in Translation: When GPT-4V(ision) Can’t See Eye to Eye with Text A Vision-Language-Consistency Analysis of VLLMs and Beyond. arXiv:2310.12520.


[arXiv]

Publications

Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Lexical Substitution as Causal Language Modeling. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024). Association for Computational Linguistics.

 

Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, Jai Riley and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Paraphrase Identification via Textual Inference. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Logan Woudstra, Moyo Dawodu, Frances Igwe, Senyu Li, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Identifying Emotional and Polar Concepts via Synset Translation. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Ning Shi, Senyu Li, Guoqing Luo, Amirreza Mirzaei, Ali Rafiei, Jai Riley, Hadi Sheikhi, Mahvash Siavashpour, Mohammad Tavakoli, Bradley Hauer and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. UAlberta at SemEval-2024 Task 1: A Potpourri of Methods for Quantifying Multilingual Semantic Textual Relatedness and Similarity. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024).


🏆 1st Place on Track A English among all submitted systems.

Xiang Zhang, Senyu Li, Bradley Hauer, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. Don’t Trust ChatGPT when your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7915–7927, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Poster] [Slides] [Video] (Oral)

Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, and Heng Ji. 2023. From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9607–9632, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code]

Michael Ogezi, Bradley Hauer, Talgat Omarov, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. UAlberta at SemEval-2023 Task 1: Context Augmentation and Translation for Multilingual Visual Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pages 2043–2051, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides]

Xiang Zhang, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. Bridging the Gap Between BabelNet and HowNet: Unsupervised Sense Alignment and Sememe Prediction. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2789–2798, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.


[Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides] [Video] (Oral)

Ning Shi, Boxin Wang, Wei Wang, Xiangyu Liu, and Zhouhan Lin. 2022. Revisit Systematic Generalization via Meaningful Learning. In Proceedings of the Fifth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 62–79, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster]

Ning Shi, Bin Tang, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Yewen Pu, Jie Fu, and Zhouhan Lin. 2022. Text Editing as Imitation Game. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 1583–1594, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.


Presented at the Second Version of Generation, Evaluation & Metrics (GEM) Workshop.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides] [Video]

Zihan Zhang, Jinfeng Li, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Xiangyu Liu, Rong Zhang, Hui Xue, Donghong Sun, and Chao Zhang. 2022. RoChBert: Towards Robust BERT Fine-tuning for Chinese. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 3502–3516, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code]

Wei Wang, Boxin Wang, Ning Shi, Jinfeng Li, Bingyu Zhu, Xiangyu Liu, and Rong Zhang. 2021. Counterfactual Adversarial Learning with Representation Interpolation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4809–4820, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides]

Ning Shi, Wei Wang, Boxin Wang, Jinfeng Li, Xiangyu Liu, and Zhouhan Lin. 2021. Incorporating External POS Tagger for Punctuation Restoration. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021, pages 1987–1991.


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides] [Video]

Ning Shi, Ziheng Zeng, Haotian Zhang, and Yichen Gong. 2020. Recurrent Inference in Text Editing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1758–1769, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.


Presented at the Fourth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP (SPNLP).


[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides]

Keran Zhao, Yuheng Hu, Yingda Lu & Ning Shi. 2019. The Impact of Emotion on Social Media Content Consumption: Evidence from Video Analysis on Live Streaming Platforms. In the Annual Meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) 2019, Seattle, WA.


Ning Shi. 2018. The Relationship of Academic Capital and Altmetrics: Effects of Elsevier Metrics on Mendeley Reader Count. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Science in Management and Systems at New York University.

Education

University of Alberta

Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science


Georgia Institute of Technology

Master of Science in Computer Science


Syracuse University

Master of Science in Applied Data Science


New York University

Master of Science in Management and Systems


Donghua University

Bachelor of Management in Electronic Commerce

 

Edmonton, Canada

Sep. 2022 - (May 2026)


Atlanta, USA

Sep. 2019 - May 2022


Syracuse, USA

Sep. 2018 - May 2021


New York, USA

Sep. 2016 - May 2018


Shanghai, China

Sep. 2010 - Jun. 2014

Experience

Association for Computational Linguistics

ARR Support Team Member


University of Alberta

Graduate Teaching Assistant

CMPUT 174 - Introduction to the Foundations of Computation I

CMPUT 261 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

CMPUT 331 - Computational Cryptography

CMPUT 399 - Topics in Computing Science

Research Topic - Emotion Identification at the Word Sense Level

Undergrad - Logan Woudstra

CMPUT 650 - Topics in Artificial Intelligence: Computational Semantics


Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)

Graduate Research Assistant

Supervisor - Prof. Grzegorz Kondrak

Research Topics - Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning


CIFAR-OSMO AI4Good Lab

Graduate Teaching Assistant

AI For Good Summer Lab Program


Computing Research Association

Research Mentor

Undergraduate Research to PhD Program (UR2PhD)

Research Topic - Understanding Multilingual Emotional Expressions

Undergrad - Frances Igwe, Moyo Dawodu

[Certificate]


Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)

Research Intern - Advised by Dr. Jie Fu


Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Governance Laboratory (AAIG), Alibaba Group

Turing Security Lab, Alibaba Group

Senior Algorithm Engineer (Algorithm Engineer II)


Shining Lab

Founder - Advised by Prof. Zhouhan Lin


Learnable, Inc.

Machine Learning Engineer

Machine Learning Engineer Intern


Pythagoras Investment Management LLC

Algorithm Engineer Intern

 

Edmonton, Canada (Remote)

Oct. 2023 - Now


Edmonton, Canada

Sep. 2022 - Now

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Edmonton, Canada

Sep. 2022 - Now

 

 


Edmonton, Canada

Apr. 2024 - Jun. 2024

 


Edmonton, Canada (Hybrid)

Sep. 2023 - Dec. 2023

 

 

 

 


Beijing, China

Aug. 2022 - Aug. 2023


Hangzhou, China

Nov. 2020 - Jul. 2022

 


Shanghai, China

Sep. 2019 - Now


Boston, United States

Sep. 2018 - Sep. 2020

Aug. 2018 - Sep. 2018


New York City, United States

Dec. 2017 - May 2018

Talks

Inspiring Natural Language Processing with Human Cognition

[Web] [Slides] [Video]


Text Editing as Imitation Game

[Web] [Slides] [Video]


Recurrent Inference in Text Editing

[Web] [Slides] [Video]

 

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) AI Seminar

Dec. 23rd, 2022


the Second GEM in EMNLP 2022

Dec. 7th, 2022


the Fourth SPNLP in EMNLP 2020

Nov. 20th, 2020

Services

Reviewer

Journal

Conference

Workshop


Secondary Reviewer

Journal

Conference

Workshop


Volunteer

 


Electronic Commerce Research, Information Processing and Management

ACL 2023, ARR 2021-2024, COLM 2024, EMNLP 2022-2023, ICLR 2024, ICML 2022-2024, NeurIPS 2022-2023, RLC 2024

ENLSP 2023, SemEval 2023



Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Canadian AI 2023, EMNLP 2023, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, LREC-COLING 2024

CAWL 2023, SemEval 2024


ACL 2023, ARR Support Team

Awards

Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship



GSA Academic Travel Grant



Full Doctoral Scholarship


Graduate Research Assistantship Fellowship

 

Alberta, Canada

Nov. 29th, 2023


Graduate Students' Association, University of Alberta

Jul. 27th, 2023


Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Sep. 2022 - (May 2026)

Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Sep. 2022 - (May 2026)