Welcome to the INK Lab @ USC

The Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Lab at USC is a group of reseachers working on next-generation machine intelligence techniques for label-efficient machine learning, knowledge-guided natural language processing and knowledge reasoning. Our research spans across machine learning, natural language processing and data mining, with a focus on weak-supervision methods for modeling natural-language text data and graph-structured data. We are excited about both developing computational models and building practical systems for real-world applications. Led by Prof. Xiang Ren, the INK lab is also part of USC Machine Learning Center, NLP Community@USC, and ISI Center on Knowledge Graphs.

News

  • 6/ 2022 - Our paper NewsEdits, led by Alexander, won an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022 for its contribution to best resource.
  • 5/ 2022 - Xiang serves as senior area chair for EMNLP 2022 on commonsense reasoning
  • 4/ 2022 - Xiang is selected as a Google Research Scholar.
  • 4/ 2022 - Xiang starts part time as a visiting research scientist at AI2.
  • 02/ 2022 - Xiang gave a talk at AI2 about commonsense reasoning in the wild. Check our slides for our recent work.
  • 12/ 2021 - Chenguang, Yuchen, Yicong, Meng, Wenhao and Xiang will be giving a tutorial "Knowledge-Augmented Methods for Natural Language Processing" at ACL 2022.
  • 12/ 2021 - Xiang will start a collaborative project on bias mitigation of NLP models supported by a Facebook Research Award.
  • 11/ 2021 - Xiang will co-organize three workshop in 2022 *CL conferences: Workshop on Commonsense Representation and Reasoning and FL4NLP at ACL 2022, and DeepLo at NAACL 2022
  • 10/ 2021 - Xiang will serve as an action editor (area chair) for ACL Rolling Review.
  • 09/ 2021 - INK lab has 3 papers accepted at NeurIPS 2021 (one spotlight, two posters), presenting new results on explanation-based for NLP and continual learning.
  • 08/ 2021 - INK lab has 9 papers accepted at EMNLP 2021 and 3 papers accepted to Findings of EMNLP. Congratulations to all authors!
  • 07/23/ 2021 - Our lab received a research award from USC + Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learning to work on federated learning for NLP -- media coverage by Amazon and USC.
  • 07/ 2021 - Xiang serves as area chair for EMNLP 2021, ICLR 2022, and AAAI 2022.
  • 06/ 2021 - USC covers our K-12 outreach activities on explaining to high school kids how AI can be applied to help combat online hate speech.
  • 06/ 2021 - Congratulations to Dongho, Ravi and the other authors for their paper "AutoTriggER: Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Trigger Extraction" wining the Best Paper Award at NAACL TrustNLP workshop!
  • 05/ 2021 - INK lab has 7 papers accepted to ACL 2021 and its findings, spanning over analysis of language models regarding common sense, question answering, and explanation-based learning.
  • 04/ 2021 - Our group won a NSF CAREER award to support the work on teaching machine through human explanations.
  • 04/ 2021 - Our work on probing languages models (NumerSense) and knowledge-aware graph networks (KagNet) got covered by Communications of the ACM.
  • 04/ 2021 - Xiang gave an invited talk at Amazon Alexa AI.
  • 03/ 2021 - INK lab has 4 papers accepted at NAACL 2021, with topics spanning over bias mitigation, open-ended commonsense reasoning, and cross-lingual learning
  • 03/ 2021 - Xiang participated at USC Viterbi's K-12 outreach with Theodore Roosevelt High School and STEM Academy Hollywood.
  • 02/ 2021 - Xiang gave an invited talk at UIUC NLP Seminar on "Teaching Machine through Human Explanations". Slides are available now.
  • 01/ 2021 - Check out our new papers on pre-training for concept-centric common sense and deceiving knowledge graph-augmented models; both accepted to ICLR 2021.
  • 11/ 2020 - Our EMNLP work CommonGen and NumerSense got covered by Tech Xplore, Radio.com, EurekAlert and ScienceDaily.
  • 11/ 2020 - Our team got selected to participate in the 4th Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge.
  • 10/ 2020 - Xiang is serving as Area Chair for ACL 2021, NAACL 2021 and IJCAI 2021.
  • Sep, 2020 - INK lab has 12 papers accepted to EMNLP 2020 (7 to main conference and 5 to Findings of EMNLP).
  • Aug, 2020 - Xiang will serve as Area Chair for AAAI 2021.
  • Aug, 2020 - Xiang will join a penal in DaSH@KDD 2020 to discuss open challenges in human-computer cooperation in data science, with Azza Adouzied, AnHai Doan, and Marti Hearts.
  • Jul, 2020 - Our ACL work on examining and reducing biases in hate speech detection algorithms is featured by Digital Trends, ScienceDaily, EurekAlert, Unite.AI, and USCViterbi.
  • Jul, 2020 - Xiang will serve as area chair in ICLR 2021.
  • May, 2020 - INK lab members Ryan Moreno and Lily Cao won Undegraduate Outstanding Student Award from USC. Congratulations!
  • May, 2020 - Our paper "NERO: A Neural Rule Grounding Framework for Label Efficient Relation Extraction" received Best Paper Award Runner-up at The Web Conference 2020!
  • Apr, 2020 - INK Lab has four papers accepted at ACL 2020.
  • Apr, 2020 - Our LEAN-LIFE system for label-efficient, explanation-based annotation has been accepted to ACL 2020 demo track.
  • Mar, 2020 - Xiang received a Sony Faculty Research Award to support our work on learning from natural language explanations.
  • Mar, 2020 - Xiang will serve as area chair for ML on NLP in EMNLP 2020.
  • Feb, 2020 - Xiang gave invited talk about "Fast Learning with Explanation and Prior Knowledge" at CMU LTI colloquium and UT Austin.
  • Dec 2019 - INK lab has two papers (spotlight & poster) accepted at ICLR 2020.
  • Nov 2019 - Xiang was invited for a talk at CMU LTI Colloquium in Feb, 2020.
  • Sep 2019- Xiang received a data science research award from Adobe Research to work on neural symbolic learning for recommendation.
  • Aug 2019 - INK lab members have 10 papers accepted at EMNLP 2019. Congratulations!
  • June 2019 - INK lab received a gift award from Snapchat to work on modular neural networks for interpretable NLP.
  • June 2019 - INK lab received a DARPA GAILA grant to work on building AI to mimic children language learning.
  • Mar 2019 - Xiang received a Google Faculty Award for supporting INK lab's research on explainable recommendation.
  • Jan 2019 - INK lab's research on interpretable knowledge reasoning is funded by JP Morgan AI Research Award.
  • Jan 2019 - INK lab received a 2018 Amazon Research Award on neural-symbolic learning for NLP.
  • Jan 2019 - Xiang is serving as area chair (information extraction) of ACL 2019.
  • Dec 2018 - Xiang is organizer of the ICLR 2019 LLD Workshop on learning from limited labeled data.
  • Dec 2018 - Xiang is organizer of the RepL4NLP Workshop at ACL 2019 on representation Learning for NLP. We're soliciting submissions.
  • Nov 2018 - Xiang is organizing the DeepLo Workshop at EMNLP 2019 on deep learning for low-resource NLP.
  • Oct 2018 - Excited to release a new OpenIE system, ReMine. A key distinguishing feature is the ability to learn from entire corpus for measuring cohesiveness of the extraction. (Project | Github)
  • Sep 2018 - Thanks National Science Foundation for supporting INK lab's collaborative research on Modeling the Invention, Dissemination, and Translation of Scientific Concepts.
  • Aug 2018: Three papers accepted to NIPS and EMNLP.
  • Aug 2018: Xiang Ren is co-organizer of AKBC 2019. Please submit your workshop proposals.
  • Aug 2018: Congrats to Yuchen on his two papers accepted to EMNLP!
  • July 2018: Xiang's research monograph on Effort-Light (WeakSupervision) approaches for Information Extraction is published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
  • July 2018: Xiang won the 2018 SIGKDD Dissertation Award!
  • May 2018 - Paper on scalable deep generative model for graph accepted to ICML 2018. Github is up.
  • May 2018: A WWW paper won the Best Poster Award Runner-up.
  • Apr 2018: Two papers accepted to KDD and ACL.