JiaXu

Jia Xu

Assistant Professor
Stevens Institute of Technology

Other affiliations:
Affiliated faculty at City University of New York
Co-adjutant at Rutgers University

Contact Info
jxu70@stevens.edu

news

announcements

I am creating methods for competitive machine translation systems. These methods often push things beyond the current state-of-the-art. To achieve this, I am devising general machine learning methods, study their empirical and theoretical limitations, and introduce techniques in ensemble learning, subsampling methods, and bringing geometric techniques in the study of structured prediction.

I am an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Previously, I was an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a faculty member and Ph.D. advisor at Tsinghua University. As a graduate student supervised by Hermann Ney from RWTH Aachen, I had fruitful visits to IBM in Watson and the NLP group in Microsoft Research (MSR) Redmond. My current research interests are in Machine Learning, with a focus on highly competitive machine translation systems. Lately, I have developed an interest in devising techniques that explore the underlying metric and geometric properties of machine translation systems. I am publishing in mainstream venues in computational linguistics and machine learning (e.g., AAAI, ICML, ACL). I am often leading teams that win first (or one of the first) position in machine translation competitions.

Resilient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Participating Agents

Xuting Tang, Jia Xu, and Shusen Wang


Unveiling Equity: Exploring Feature Dependency using Complex-Valued Neural Networks for Fair Data Analysis

Xuting Tang, Mengjiao Zhang, Abdul Rafae Khan, Steve Yang, and Jia Xu


ConceptX: A Framework for Latent Concept Analysis

Firoj Alam, Fahim Dalvi, Nadir Durrani, Hassan Sajjad, Abdul Rafae Khan, and Jia Xu


Learning Uncertainty for Unknown Domains with Zero-Target-Assumption

Yu Yu, Hassan Sajjad, and Jia Xu


Probabilistic Robustness for Data Filtering

Yu Yu, Abdul Rafae Khan, Shahram Khadivi, and Jia Xu


Fluent Translation Built on Giant Pre-trained Models

Abdul Rafae Khan, Hrishikesh Kanade, Girish Amar Budhrani, Preet Jhanglani, and Jia Xu


Can Data Diversity Enhance Learning Generalization?

Yu Yu, Shahram Khadivi, and Jia Xu


Byte-based Multilingual NMT for Endangered Languages

Mengjiao Zhang and Jia Xu


Measuring Robustness for NLP

Yu Yu, Abdul Rafae Khan, and Jia Xu


Learning by Interpreting

Xuting Tang, Abdul Rafae Khan, Shusen Wang, and Jia Xu


Analyzing Encoded Concepts in Transformer Language Models

Hassan Sajjad, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Firoj Alam, Abdul Rafae Khan, and Jia Xu


Discovering Latent Concepts Learned in BERT

Fahim Dalvi, Abdul Rafae Khan, Firoj Alam, Nadir Durrani, Jia Xu, Hassan Sajjad


Grouping Words with Semantic Diversity

Karine Chubarian, Abdul Rafae Khan, Anastasios Sidiropoulos, and Jia Xu (alphabetically ordered)


Interpreting Criminal Charge Prediction and Its Algorithmic Bias via Quantum-Inspired Complex Valued Networks

Abdul Rafae Khan, Jia Xu, Peter Varsanyi, and Rachit Pabreja


Coding Textual Inputs Boosts the Accuracy of Neural Networks

Abdul Rafae Khan, Jia Xu, and Weiwei Sun


A Clustering Framework for Lexical Normalization of Roman Urdu

Abdul Rafae Khan, Asim Karim, Hassan Sajjad, Faisal Kamiran, and Jia Xu


CUNY-PKU Parser at SemEval-2019 task 1: Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing with UCCA

Weimin Lyu, Sheng Huang, Abdul Rafae Khan, Shengqiang Zhang, Weiwei Sun, and Jia Xu


WCS: Robust Network Localization by Weighted Component Stitching

Tianyuan Sun, Yongcai Wang, Deying Li, Zhaoquan Gu, and Jia Xu


Hunter NMT System for WMT18 Biomedical Translation Task: Transfer Learning in Neural Machine Translation

Abdul Rafae Khan, Subhadarshi Panda, Jia Xu, and Lampros Flokas


Assessing Quality Estimation Models for Sentence-Level Prediction

Hoang Cuong and Jia Xu


On the Efficient Online Model Adaptation by Incremental Simplex Tableau

Zhixian Lei, Xuehan Ye, Yongcai Wang, Deying Li, Jia Xu


Hunter MT: A Course for Young Researchers in WMT17

Jia Xu, Yizong Kuang, Shondell Baijoo, Jacob Lee, Uman Shahzad, Meredith Lancaster, and Chris Carlan


On the Power and Limits of Distance-Based Learning

P. A. Papakonstantinou, J. Xu, G. Yang (authors alphabetically ordered)


System Description of ICT/Dublin NIST-15 Machine Translation System

J. Xu


Query Lattice for Translation Retrieval

M. Dong, Y. Cheng, Y. Liu, J. Xu, M. Sun


An ant colony optimization method to detect communities in social networks.

Javadi SH, Khadivi S, Shiri ME, and Xu J.


Salient Object Detection in Image Sequences via Spatial-Temporal Cue

C. Gan, Z. Qin, J. Xu and T. Wan


Enhancing Chinese Word Segmentation Using Unlabeled Data

W. Sun and J. Xu

July 2011, Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing


Generating Virtual Parallel Corpus: A Compatibility Centric Method

J. Xu and W.Sun

September 2011, Proceedings of the Machine Translation Summit


Improving Machine Translation Performance Using Comparable Corpora

A. Eisele and J. Xu

May 2010, Proceedings of the LREC Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora


Synchronous Learning of Chinese Word Segmentation and Word Alignment

J. Xu, J.Gao, K.Toutanova and H. Ney

2011, Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation (Book chapter)


Further Experiments with Shallow Hybrid MT Systems

C. Federmann, A. Eisele, Y. Chen, S. Hunsicker, J. Xu and H. Uszkoreit

July 2010, Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation


Bayesian Semi-Supervised Chinese Word Segmentation for Statistical Machine Translation

J. Xu, J. Gao, K. Toutanova and H. Ney

August 2008, Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics


Phrase Table Training for Precision and Recall: What Makes a Good Phrase and a Good Phrase Pair?

Y.Deng, J. Xu and Y. Gao

June 2008, Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics


Domain Dependent Machine Translation

J. Xu, Y. Deng, Y. Gao and H. Ney

September 2007, Proceedings of the Machine Translation Summit XI


Partitioning Parallel Documents Using Binary Segmentation

J. Xu, R. Zens and H. Ney

June 2006, Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL): Proceedings of the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation


Error Analysis of Statistical Machine Translation Output

D.Vilar, J. Xu, L. F. D'Haro and H. Ney

May 2006, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)


Integrated Chinese Word Segmentation in Statistical Machine Translation

J. Xu, E. Matusov, R. Zens and H. Ney

October 2005, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT)


The RWTH Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation System

R. Zens, O. Bender, S. Hasan, S. Khadivi, E. Matusov, J. Xu, Y. Zhang, and H. Ney

May 2005, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT)


Sentence Segmentation Using IBM Word Alignment Model 1

J. Xu, R. Zens and H. Ney

May 2005, Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2005)


Do We Need Chinese Word Segmentation for Statistical Machine Translation?

J. Xu, R. Zens and H. Ney

July 2004, Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2005)


Sequence Segmentation of Statistical Machine Translation

J. Xu

September 2010, Dissertation of Ph.D. of Computer Science


A Computational Model for Sound Processing in the Human Auditory System

J. Xu

November 2002, Dissertation of Master of Computer Science


I led the first undergraduate team to participate in the WMT competition, and we won the Finnish-English News translation track with respect to the BLEU score.
Competition Representing Rank Notes
WMT 2022 SIT 1st Code-Mixing MT subtask 2 Hinglish->English
team advisor
WMT 2022 SIT 1st (w.r.t. WER) Code-Mixing MT subtask 1 Hindi+English->Hinglish
team advisor
WMT 2018 Hunter 1st French-English Biomedical track
team leader
WMT 2017 Hunter 1st (w.r.t. BLEU) Finnish-English News track
team leader
NIST 2015 ICT-DCU 1st and 4th 1st (academic inst.) and 4th (overall)
team leader and main contributor
WMT 2011 DFKI 1st (w.r.t. BLEU) English-German News track
team leader Official result
NIST 2008 MSR 1st intern at MSR -- Official result
NIST 2006 RWTH-Aachen 4th Official result
NIST 2005 RWTH-Aachen 4th Official result
NIST 2004 RWTH-Aachen 2nd Official result
GALE 2008 RWTH-Aachen 2nd ranked second in NightInGale
GALE 2007 RWTH-Aachen 2nd ranked second in NightInGale
GALE 2006 RWTH-Aachen 2nd ranked second in NightInGale
TC-Star 2006 RWTH-Aachen 1st
TC-Star 2005 RWTH-Aachen 1st
TC-Star 2004 RWTH-Aachen 1st
Source Amount Role Duration Title Grant No.
Amazon grant 250,000 USD Principal investigator 2023-2025 Never Alone with Me (NAM) at Alexa Prize Socialbot Challenge -
NSF CRAFT pilot 30,000 USD Principal investigator 2022 Center for Research toward Advanced Financial Technologies (CRAFT) NSF IUCRC -
NSF grant 299,000 USD Co-PI 2018-2023 IUCRC Phase I Rutgers, Newark: Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) 1747728
NSFC (NSF-China) grant 660,000 RMB (100,000 USD) Co-PI 2017--2019 Key Problems for Tightly-coupled, Multi-signal Fusion based Simultaneously Locating and Mapping 61672524
ICT-CAS grant (Innovation subjects) 500,000 RMB (83,000 USD) Principal investigator 2015--2017 Ensemble learning in machine translation 20156020
KLIIP-ICT-CAS grant 200,000 RMB (33,000 USD) Principal investigator 2015 -- 2016 Novel machine learning methods 20156020
NSFC grant 660,000 RMB (100,000 USD) Co-PI 2014-2017 New approaches to the limits of efficient propositional reasoning: algorithms, approximations and foundations 20131351464
IIIS-Tsinghua grant 150,000 RMB (25,000 USD) Principal investigator 2012-2015 Machine learning and machine translation NA

I had the opportunities giving below invited talks recently.
Affiliation Month
CUNY GC May 2019
JSALT July 2019
MTMA May 2019
Google Research NYC Dec. 2015
Columbia University Nov. 2015
University of Washington Nov. 2015
USC Nov. 2015
CWMT Oct. 2014
RWTH-Aachen University Oct. 2014
Aarhus University Oct. 2014
Stanford University Apr. 2014
Facebook Mar. 2014

Name Position University Starting Month
Abdul Khan Postdoc Stevens Apr 2020
Mengjiao Zhang Ph.D. Stevens Aug 2019
Xuting Tang Ph.D. Stevens Aug 2019
Yu Yu Ph.D. Stevens Aug 2020

Name Position University Month Thesis
Cuong Huang Postdoc CUNY 17-18 (Research) Quality Estimation
Abdul Khan Ph.D. CUNY GC Jun 2019 Robust Neural Machine Translation
Sejal Vyas MSc Stevens Aug 2020
Sattvik Sahai MSc Stevens Aug 2020
Geliang Chen MSc Tsinghua Dec 2016 Phrase-based Language Model for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT)
Xiaojun Zhang MSc U. Saarland (Co-adv. Prof. Uszkoreit) Nov 2011 Two-level Parallel Text Extraction from Comparable Corpora
Shun Zheng B.S. BUPT May 2014 Improvements on Word Alignment Models in SMT
Zhengping Che B.S. Tsinghua Jun 2013 Dirichlet Process Model for Phrase-based MT
Yulong Zeng B.S. Tsinghua Jun 2013 A Comparative Study of Generative Model and Discriminative Model
Zhibo Zhang B.S. Tsinghua Jun 2013 Machine Learning-based Crime Prediction
Geliang Chen B.S. Peking University Jun 2013 A Novel Approach for Language Model
Yong Cheng B.S. NJTU Jun 2013 Analysis of User Behaviors in Social Network