shafiq

Students

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti

The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.
— Geoffrey Hinton

I am now full-time at Salesforce AI Research and on long-term leave from NTU; I will not take any new students


Current Graduate Students

  • Fangkai Jiao [PhD, Aug, 2022 - ] (Co-supervision) [Papers: 2*NAACL-24, TPAMI-24]

Alumni

PhD
  • Li Xingxuan [PhD, Aug, 2021 - Aug, 2025]
    • Papers: 2*ACL-23, EMNLP-23, ICLR-24, 2*EMNLP-24, NAACL-25, ACL-25, EMNLP-25]
    • Thesis: Towards Reliable Generative Language Models: Factuality, Safety, and Robustness
    • First Employment: Research Scientist, MiroMind
  • Chengwei Qin [PhD, Jan, 2021 - Apr, 2025]
    • Papers: ICLR-22, ACL-22, ACL-23, 2*EMNLP-23, NAACL-24, ACL-24, 2*EMNLP-24, NeurIPS-24]
    • Thesis: Making Language Models Better Human-like Learners
    • First Employment: Asst. Prof, HKUST, Guangzhou
  • Ruochen Zhao [PhD, Jan, 2021 - Mar, 2025] AISG PhD fellowship
    • Papers: 2*ACL-23, EMNLP-23, ICLR-24, EACL-24]
    • Thesis: Towards Trustworthy and Reliable Language Models
    • First Employment: Research Engineer, Apple
  • Chen Hailin [PhD, Jan, 2021 - Feb, 2025]
    • Papers: EMNLP-22, 2* EMNLP-23, ICLR-24]
    • Thesis: Developing Locally Trainable Large Language Models
    • First Employment: Research Scientist, Salesforce, US
  • Mathieu Ravaut [PhD, Jan, 2021 - Jul, 2024]
    • Papers: ACL-22, EMNLP-22, ACL-23, ACL-24]
    • Thesis: Neural Abstractive Summarization: Improvements at the Sequence-Level ( SDSC dissertation fellowship )
    • First Employment: Research Scientist, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA)
  • Bosheng Ding [PhD, Jan, 2020 - Apr, 2024] (Co-supervier Alibaba-NTU)
    • Papers: EMNLP-20, ACL-21, ACL-22, ACL-23, EMNLP-23, NAACL-24, ICLR-24
    • Thesis: Advancing Low Resource Information Extraction and Dialogue System Using Data Efficient Methods
  • Xuan Phi Nguyen [PhD, Aug, 2019 - Mar, 2023]
    • Papers: NeurIPS-20, ICLR-20, 2*ACL-20, NAACL-21, ACL-21, ICML-21, ICLR-22, NeurIPS-22, ICASSP-23
    • Thesis: Improving Neural Machine Translation: Data Centric Approaches ( SDSC dissertation fellowship 2022, Nominated for for best SCSE thesis award 2023 (under evaluation) )
    • Employment: Research Scientist, Salesforce, US
  • Lin Xiang [PhD, Aug, 2018 - Dec, 2022]
    • Papers: ACL-19, EMNLP-19, EACL-21, ICML-21, ACL-22
    • Thesis: Natural Language Processing as Autoregressive Generation
    • First Employment: Quantitative/NLP Researcher, GIC, Singapore
  • M Saiful Bari [PhD, Jan, 2019 - Dec, 2022]
    • Papers: ACL-19, AAAI-20, EMNLP-20, 2*ACL-21, EMNLP-21, ICLR-22, 3*ACL-23]
    • Thesis: Transfer Learning for Language Model Adaptation
    • First Employment: Senior Research Scientist, Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA), KSA
  • Han-Cheol Moon [PhD, Jan, 2019 - Dec, 2022]
    • Papers: EMNLP-19, KDD-22, ACL-23]
    • Thesis: Toward Robust Natural Language Systems
    • First Employment: ML engineer, Samsung Research, South Korea
  • Linlin Liu [PhD, Jan, 2019 - Dec, 2022] (Co-supervision)
    • Papers: EMNLP-19, EMNLP-20, 2*ACL-21, EMNLP-22, ACL-23
    • Thesis: Towards Robust Natural Language and Image Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios
    • First Employment: Data Scientist, Cubist Systematic Strategies, Singapore
  • Wang Weishi [PhD, Aug, 2019 - Dec, 2022] (Co-supervisor, Salesforce-NTU)
    • Papers: EMNLP-20, EMNLP-21, FSE-23, 2*EMNLP-23]
    • Thesis: Neural Code Generation for Robust Automatic Program Repair
    • First Employment: Data Scientist, SAP, Singapore
  • Prathyusha Jwalapuram [PhD, Aug, 2018 - Jul, 2022] A*STAR International Fellowship (AIF) (for post-doc)
    • Papers: ACL-19, EMNLP-19, AAAI-20, EMNLP-20, EACL-21, ACL-22
    • Thesis: Building Generalizable Models for Discourse Phenomena Evaluation and Machine Translation
    • First Employment: Research Scientist, Rakuten, Singapore
  • Samson Tan [PhD @NUS, Aug, 2019 - Apr, 2022] (Company supervisor, Salesforce-NUS) NUS Dean's Research Excellence Award 2021, Research Achievement Award, 2020
    • Papers: ACL-20, EMNLP-20, NAACL-21, ACL-21, ACL-22
    • Thesis: Linguistically-Inclusive Natural Language Processing
    • First Employment: Applied Scientist, Amazon AWS AI Research & Education, US
  • Tasnim Mohiuddin [Jan, 2018 - Dec, 2021] 1st runner up for best thesis award 2022
    • Papers: ACL-18, EMNLP-19, 2*NAACL-19, EMNLP-20, CL-18, CL-20, EACL-21, 2*ACL-21, EMNLP-22
    • Thesis: Neural Machine Translation with Limited Resources
    • First Employment: NLP Researcher, Huawei Research Center, Singapore
  • Nguyen Thanh Tung [Aug, 2017 - Jul, 2021]
    • Papers: NAACL-19, 2*ACL-20, NAACL-21, ACL-21, ICML-21
    • Thesis: Structured Pointing Networks for Natural Language Understanding
    • First Employment: Research Scientist, I2R A-star, Singapore
Undergraduate (FYP)