Hoifung Poon

Address:
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350

Telephone: (206) 543-8086
Fax: (206) 543-2969
Email: <first name > at cs dot washington dot edu
Office: 318 Allen Center

Welcome! I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. My research interest lies in statistical relational learning (SRL) with applications to natural language processing. My research hypothesis is that relational structures that abound in the real world can be leveraged not only to make modeling more accurate, but also to enable effective learning with little or no supervision. This sparks many intriguing and challenging research questions. On the methodology side, I am interested in unsupervised learning where the lack of label information is compensated by leveraging the relational structures. On the application side, I am thrilled by the prospect of automatic knowledge induction from free text, a.k.a. machine reading, which promises to breach the knowledge acquisition bottleneck once and for all (with a side product of solving AI :-). My advisor is Pedro Domingos. Currently, I am working on unsupervised semantic parsing with Markov Logic, with application to knowledge extraction from biomedical literature.

Publications

Unsupervised Semantic Parsing. Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos. Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, (EMNLP-09). Singapore: ACL. Main conference. Acceptance rate: 20%. Best Paper Award [Slides] [Download data and code]
Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation with Log-Linear Models. Hoifung Poon, Colin Cherry, and Kristina Toutanova. Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies 2009 conference. (NAACL/HLT-09). Boulder, Colorado: ACL. Main conference. Acceptance rate: 29%. Best Paper Award (Also awarded IBM Best Student Paper.) [Slides]
Language ID in the Context of Harvesting Language Data off the Web. Fei Xia, William Lewis and Hoifung Poon. Proceedings of the Conference of European Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009 (EACL-09). Athens, Greece: ACL.
Joint Unsupervised Coreference Resolution with Markov Logic. Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2008 (EMNLP-08). Honolulu, HI: ACL. Main conference. Acceptance rate: 20%.
A General Method for Reducing the Complexity of Relational Inference and its Application to MCMC. Hoifung Poon, Pedro Domingos, and Marc Sumner. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2008 (AAAI-08). Chicago, IL: AAAI Press. Acceptance rate: 24%.
Markov Logic (book chapter). Pedro Domingos, Stanley Kok, Daniel Lowd, Hoifung Poon, Matthew Richardson, Parag Singla. In L. De Raedt, P. Frasconi, K. Kersting and S. Muggleton (eds.), Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming (pp. 92-117), 2008. New York: Springer.
Joint Inference in Information Extraction. Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 913-918), 2007 (AAAI-07). Vancouver, Canada: AAAI Press. (Online appendix) Acceptance rate: 27%.
Sound and Efficient Inference with Probabilistic and Deterministic Dependencies. Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos. Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 458-463), 2006 (AAAI-06). Boston, MA: AAAI Press. Acceptance rate: 22%.
Unifying Logical and Statistical AI. Pedro Domingos, Stanley Kok, Hoifung Poon, Matthew Richardson, Parag Singla. Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 2-7), 2006 (AAAI-06). Boston, MA: AAAI Press.

Software

The Alchemy System for Statistical Relational AI (Technical Report). Stanley Kok, Marc Sumner, Matthew Richardson, Parag Singla, Hoifung Poon, Daniel Lowd, Pedro Domingos. 2006. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu.

Last modified: August. 23, 2009