Liang Huang Huang Liang

5th-year PhD student (I'm graduating!)

Department of Computer & Information Science (CIS)
3330 Walnut Street, Levine Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: (215) 898-8543
Fax: (215) 898-0587

Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS)
3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Email: lhuang3 at cis dot upenn dot edu
Alternative Homepage at USC/ISI

My advisor is Prof. Aravind Joshi.
I also work with Dr. Kevin Knight at USC/ISI.

Research Area: Computational Linguistics (and Theoretical Computer Science)

[CV].

God has a Book where he maintains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect... You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book.

-- Paul Erdös (1913-1996)

About Me...

I am from Shanghai China, speaking Wu as my mother tongue. During high school years, I got fascinated in programming so I went to college with a major in computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, focusing on algorithms and theory. Throughout the years I competed in various algorithmic programming contests, including the National Olympiads in Informatics (NOI) and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contests (ACM/ICPC). Then I came to the US in Fall 2003 to pursue a PhD in computer science on the beautiful campus of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). In addition, I spent two summers (2005 and 2006) at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (USC/ISI), under Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu. I also work on applying computational linguistics to computational biology, in collaboration with Ken Dill's group at UCSF.

Teaching

Teaching is great fun for me!

Instructor:

CSE 399-005, Python Programming, Spring 2006 (half-semester mini-course)

Teaching Assistant:

CSE 262 Automata, Complexity and Computability, Fall 2004 (TA for Prof. Jean Gallier),
CSE 320 Algorithms, Spring 2005 (TA for Prof. Sanjeev Khanna)

Awarded 2005 Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students (University award for top 12 TAs).
My basic idea of teaching is intuition visualisation. Click here for my teaching statement.

Research Interests

Computational Linguistics
- Efficient Parsing Algorithms and Applications
- Syntax-based Machine Translation
- Synchoronous Grammars and Tree Transducers
Theoretical Computer Science
- Generic Dynamic Programming, Hypergraph and Semiring Frameworks
- Algorithms for k-best Problems

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
-- Albert Einstein

Publications

PhD Dissertation Related
- Qualification Exam Report (WPE II): Dynamic Programming in Semiring and Hypergraph Frameworks.
  Committee: Sudipto Guha, Aravind Joshi, and Fernando Pereira (chair).
  Defended Tuesday November 28th, 2006. More info.
- Dissertation Proposal: A Search in the Forest: Efficient Algorithms for Parsing and Machine Translation based on Packed-Forests.
  Advisors: Aravind Joshi and Kevin Knight.
  Committeee: Mark Johnson (Brown), Mitch Marcus, Fernando Pereira, and Ben Taskar (chair).
  Defended Monday February 25th, 2008.
- Dissertation
  Expected to defend in August or October 2008.
Computational Linguistics
- Liang Huang (2008). Forest Reranking: Discriminative Parsing with Non-Local Features.
  To appear in Proceedings of ACL 2008, Columbus, OH.
  [pdf] [slides] [bib]
  Software: the modified Charniak parser that outputs packed forests (to be released).
- Haitao Mi, Liang Huang, and Qun Liu (2008). Forest-based Translation.
  To appear in Proceedings of ACL 2008, Columbus, OH.
  [pdf] [slides] [bib]
- Wenbin Jiang, Liang Huang and Qun Liu and Yajuan Lü (2008). A Cascaded Linear Model for Joint Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-Speech Tagging.
  To appear in Proceedings of ACL 2008, Columbus, OH.
  [pdf] [slides] [bib]
- [Under Review] Liang Huang, Hao Zhang, Daniel Gildea, and Kevin Knight (2007). Binarization of Synchronous Context-Free Grammars.
  Submitted to Computational Linguistics.
  Technical Report version: [pdf]
  Journal version of the 2006 conference paper, including many new results, especially the first real-data examples of non-binarizable syntactic reorderings between English and Chinese, and a new section on efficient handling of those non-binarizable rules.
- Liang Huang and David Chiang (2007). Forest Rescoring: Faster Decoding with Integrated Language Models.
  In Proceedings of ACL 2007, Prague, Czech Rep.
  [paper] [slides] [bib]
  Software: Cubit
- Liang Huang (2007). Binarization, Synchronous Binarization, and Target-side Binarization.
  In Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST), Rochester, NY.
  [paper] [slides] [bib]
- Liang Huang, Kevin Knight, and Aravind Joshi (2006). Statistical Syntax-Directed Translation with Extended Domain of Locality.
  In Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), Boston, MA.
  [paper] [slides] [bib]
  Preliminary version appeared in the Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2006 Workshop on Computationally Hard Problems.
- Hao Zhang, Liang Huang, Daniel Gildea, and Kevin Knight (2006). Synchronous Binarization for Machine Translation.
  In Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2006, Brooklyn, NY.
  [paper] [slides] [bib]
- Liang Huang and David Chiang (2005). Better k-best Parsing.
  In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2005), Vancouver, BC.
  [paper] [slides] [bib].
  Note: This version corrects the behavior of the published version in some boundary conditions regarding Algorithm 3. Thanks to David A. Smith and Jonathan May for pointing it out. The actual implementations, however, use an earlier version which has the correct behavior (but less efficient). The published version is archived here.
- Liang Huang, Hao Zhang and Dan Gildea (2005). Machine Translation as Lexicalized Parsing with Hooks.
  In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2005), Vancouver, BC.
  [paper] [slides] [bib]
Computational Biology
- Adam Lucas, Liang Huang, Aravind Joshi, and Ken Dill (2007). Statistical Mechanics of Helix Bundles using a Dynamic Programming Approach.
  J. Am. Chem. Soc., 129 (14), 4272 -4281. JACS online version.
- Ken Dill, Adam Lucas, Julia Hockenmaier, Liang Huang, David Chiang, and Aravind Joshi (2007). Computational Linguistics: a new tool for exploring biopolymer structures and statistical mechanics.
  To appear in Polymer, Elsevier.
Programming Languages
- Stephanie Weirich and Liang Huang (2004). A Design for Type-Directed Programming in Java.
  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Object-Oriented Developments, ENTCS.
  [ps] [pdf]
  The extended version is University of Pennsylvania Computer & Information Science Technical Report MS-CIS-04-11. [ps] [pdf].
Algorithms
- Rujia Liu and Liang Huang. The Art of Algorithms and Programming Contests (Book in Chinese). Tsinghua University Press, 2003.
  Contents (in English) Errata (in Chinese)

Personal

Some facts about me...

Why I don't like engineering or experimentation? (not to be taken seriously)
My idol is Peter Norvig.
My favorite programming language is Python. I also love OCaml.
Like many computer scientists, I am also a Mac lover.
I am a big fan of PhD Comics!
I am a fan of Zinedine Zidane for his unraveled elegance, and thus Real Madrid.
Playing Go often prevents me from doing research...
I am color-blind. Here are some resources I collected on color-blindness. I am very interested in the mathematical theory characterizing the color space of color-blind people. Recently some experiments convinced me (and my non-color-blind friends) that my color space is two-dimensional rather than 3D, basically collapsing the red-green plane into a diagonal line (which means the transformation is irrevertible). The projected colors are usually "brownish-yellow" in the eyes of non-color-blind people. My blue vision is not affected though, and that's why it is always my favorite color. However, I don't like what they call "bleu".
I proudly speak Wu Chinese as my mother tongue, though Mandarin is also native to me.
In terms of the number of speakers, Wu (Sino-Tibetan : Sinitic : Southern) is the second largest language in China and the 10th largest in the world. It is a soft and light language spoken mainly in the Jiang-Nan region, i.e., Shanghai, Zhejiang and southern part of Jiangsu. It is very different from Mandarin in many aspects (details here).
Here are some further resources on Chinese Linguistic Groups and the Sinitic Group. I will be involved in the Romanization of Wu and/or Shanghainese.
I am a Baroque fan.
I am big fan of Classical Chinese Poetry. If you don't speak Chinese, check out this site or this site.