About Me

Welcome to my page! At present, I am a passionate researcher at Microsoft Azure AI. My primary role involves leveraging text summarization techniques for product enhancement. My journey to this position started when I earned my Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in April 2023. I was privileged to have been advised by Prof. Giuseppe Carenini during this period.

Before diving into my doctoral studies, I had the opportunity to complete my Master’s degree at UBC as well. Going further back, I acquired my Bachelor’s degree from the esteemed University of Toronto.

Previously, I invested substantial time and effort into exploring text summarization and discourse parsing, building a wealth of knowledge in these areas. Recently, my curiosity has recently been drawn towards the captivating realm of general text generation and large language models, with a specific interest in their cognitive aspects. In particular, I’m interested in exploring how large language models (LLMs) perform in complex games that involve deception and reverse logic.

Outside of work, I like traveling, kpop dancing, and a diving into movies and shows. I also have a passion for board games, especially the ‘murder’ mystery games.

Education Experience

Ph.D. - University of British Columbia, Supervisor: Prof. Giuseppe Carenini (2019 - 2023)
M.Sc. - University of British Columbia, Supervisor: Prof. Giuseppe Carenini (2017 - 2019)
B.Sc. - University of Toronto, Advisor: Prof. Gerald Penn (2013-2017)

Work Experience

Researcher, Azure AI at Microsoft (2023.6-Now)
Research Intern, Azure AI at Microsoft (2022.6-2023.5)
Research Intern, Semantic Scholar at AI2 (2021.5-2021.11)
Teaching Assistant (CPSC221), University of British Columbia (2017-2018)
Teaching Assistant (CSC236,MAT136, etc.), University of Toronto (2016-2017)

Service

Reviewer: *ACL/EMNLP/COLING series conferences since 2019
Organization Committee Member: NAACL 2021
Area Chair: AACL 2023
Organizer: Newsumm at EMNLP 2023

News

• July 13, 2023: Orally present the paper Entity-based SpanCopy for Abstractive Summarization to Improve the Factual Consistency at CODI.

• June 30, 2023: Serve as an Area Chair at AACL 2023.

• June 12, 2023: Onboard Microsoft Azure AI as a researcher.

• May 30, 2023: One paper is accepted at CODI at ACL 2023.

• May 4, 2023: Our paper ChatGPT-steered Editing Instructor for Customization of Abstractive Summarization is available on arXiv.

• April 28, 2023: Successfully defended my PhD Thesis, become Dr.Xiao officially!

• Dec 20, 2022: Our paper Attend to the Right Context: A Plug-and-Play Module for Content-Controllable Summarization now is available on arXiv.

• Oct 6, 2022: Our paper Human Guided Exploitation of Interpretable Attention Patterns in Summarization and Topic Segmentation is accepted at the main conference at EMNLP 2022!

• Sept 8, 2022: Our paper Entity-based SpanCopy for Abstractive Summarization to Improve the Factual Consistency now is available on arXiv.

• Jun 13, 2022: Start my internship at Azure AI, Microsoft!

• Feb 24, 2022: Our paper PRIMERA: Pyramid-based Masked Sentence Pre-training for Multi-document Summarization is accepted at the main conference of ACL 2022!

• Jan 14, 2022: I’m honored to be one of 2021 Interns of the Year awardees by AI2! (3 recipients in total)