Tao Yu

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at The University of Hong Kong and a co-director of the HKU NLP Lab. Also, I’ll spend the coming year (09/21-08/22 on leave from HKU) in the UW NLP Group working with Noah Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Mari Ostendorf.

My main research interest is in Natural Language Processing. The goal of my research is to design and build conversational natural language interfaces (NLIs) that can help humans explore and reason over data in any application (e.g., relational databases and mobile apps) in a robust and trusted manner. It involves studies in semantic parsing, dialogue systems, pretraining, human computer interaction, and beyond text (speech, vision etc.).

Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University, advised by Dragomir Radev. Before coming to Yale, I got my master's at Columbia University advised by Owen Rambow and Kathleen McKeown. I was an undergraduate at the University of Utah. Throughout my graduate studies, I spent several summers doing internships in industry, including Samsung Research America, Salesforce Research, and Microsoft Research. I also introduced and organized multiple popular shared tasks (e.g. Spider, SParC, CoSQL) for building conversational NLIs, which have attracted more than 100 submissions from top research labs.