San Francisco Bay Area, US
I am a Software Engineer at Google. Before joining Google, I received my PhD under the direction of Prof. W. Bruce Croft at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research is focused on dense retrieval, conversational search, and other related topics in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing.
Education
University of Massachusetts Amherst, MS and PhD in Computer Science. Amherst, MA, US, Sep. 2017 - May 2021.
Dalian University of Technology, BEng in Computer Science and Technology. Dalian, China, Sep. 2013 - Jun. 2017.
Industrial Experience
Google, Software Engineer. Content understanding, NLP, machine learning, and deep learning. Mountain View, CA, US, Jul. 2021 - Present.
Google, Research Intern. Natural language understanding. Mountain View, CA (remote from MA), US, May 2020 - Sep. 2020.
Microsoft Research, Research Intern. Information retrieval. Redmond, WA, US, May 2019 - Aug. 2019.
Alibaba Group, Research Intern. Information retrieval and NLP. Hangzhou, China, May 2018 - Aug. 2018.
Tencent, Software Engineer Intern. Backend. Shenzhen, China, Jul. 2016 - Aug. 2016.
Publications
Exploring Dual Encoder Architectures for Question Answering. Zhe Dong, Jianmo Ni, Dan Bikel, Enrique Alfonseca, Yuan Wang, Chen Qu, and Imed Zitouni. EMNLP 2022. Short Paper.
Large Dual Encoders are Generalizable Retrievers. Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernández Ábrego, Ji Ma, Vincent Y Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith B Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, and Yinfei Yang. EMNLP 2022. Long Paper.
Natural Language Understanding with Privacy-Preserving BERT. Chen Qu, Weize Kong, Liu Yang, Mingyang Zhang, Mike Bendersky, and Marc Najork. CIKM 2021. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=21.7% (271 out of 1251).
Passage Retrieval for Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering. Chen Qu, Hamed Zamani, Liu Yang, W. Bruce Croft, and Erik Learned-Miller. SIGIR 2021. Short Paper. Acceptance rate=27.6% (145 out of 526).
Weakly-Supervised Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, Cen Chen, W. Bruce Croft, Kalpesh Krishna, and Mohit Iyyer. ECIR 2021. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=24.1%.
Reinforced History Backtracking for Conversational Question Answering. Minghui Qiu, Xinjing Huang, Cen Chen, Feng Ji, Chen Qu, Wei Wei, Jun Huang, and Yin Zhang. AAAI 2021. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=21% (1,692 out of 7,911).
Open-Retrieval Conversational Question Answering. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, Cen Chen, Minghui Qiu, W. Bruce Croft, and Mohit Iyyer. SIGIR 2020. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=26% (147 out of 555).
Contextual Re-Ranking with Behavior Aware Transformers. Chen Qu, Chenyan Xiong, Yizhe Zhang, Corby Rosset, W. Bruce Croft, and Paul Bennett. SIGIR 2020. Short Paper. Acceptance rate=30% (153 out of 507).
IART: Intent-aware Response Ranking with Transformers in Information-seeking Conversation Systems. Liu Yang, Minghui Qiu, Chen Qu, Cen Chen, Jiafeng Guo, Yongfeng Zhang, W. Bruce Croft, and Haiqing Chen. WWW 2020. Short Paper. Acceptance rate=25% (98 out of 397).
Attentive History Selection for Conversational Question Answering. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, Minghui Qiu, Yongfeng Zhang, Cen Chen, W. Bruce Croft, and Mohit Iyyer. CIKM 2019. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=19% (~200 out of ~1130).
A Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Neural Conversation Model. Liu Yang, Junjie Hu, Minghui Qiu, Chen Qu, Jianfeng Gao, W. Bruce Croft, Xiaodong Liu, Yelong Shen, and Jingjing Liu. CIKM 2019. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=19% (~200 out of ~1130).
BERT with History Answer Embedding for Conversational Question Answering. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, Minghui Qiu, W. Bruce Croft, Yongfeng Zhang, and Mohit Iyyer. SIGIR 2019. Short Paper. Acceptance rate=24% (108 out of 443).
User Intent Prediction in Information-seeking Conversations. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, Bruce Croft, Yongfeng Zhang, Johanne R Trippas, and Minghui Qiu. CHIIR 2019. Full Paper.
Answer Interaction in Non-factoid Question Answering Systems. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, W. Bruce Croft, Falk Scholer, and Yongfeng Zhang. CHIIR 2019. Short Paper.
Learning to Selectively Transfer: Reinforced Transfer Learning for Deep Text Matching. Chen Qu, Feng Ji, Minghui Qiu, Liu Yang, Zhiyu Min, Haiqing Chen, Jun Huang, and W. Bruce Croft. WSDM 2019. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=16% (84 out of 511).
Analyzing and Characterizing User Intent in Information-seeking Conversations. Chen Qu, Liu Yang, W. Bruce Croft, Johanne R Trippas, Yongfeng Zhang, and Minghui Qiu. SIGIR 2018. Short Paper. Acceptance rate=30% (98 out of 327).
Response Ranking with Deep Matching Networks and External Knowledge in Information-seeking Conversation Systems. Liu Yang, Minghui Qiu, Chen Qu, Jiafeng Guo, Yongfeng Zhang, W. Bruce Croft, Jun Huang, and Haiqing Chen. SIGIR 2018. Full Paper. Acceptance rate=21% (86 out of 409).
Services
Conference PC Member and Reviewer: SIGIR, CIKM, ECIR, ICTIR, KDD, ACL, ARR, EMNLP, AAAI, AACL, IJCNLP, WebConf (WWW)
Journal Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), Information Retrieval Journal, Information Processing and Management (IPM)
Awards
PhD Candidacy with Distinction. 2020.
W. Bruce Croft Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science. 2019.
SIGIR Student Travel Grant: SIGIR 2020, CIKM 2019, CHIIR 2019, SIGIR 2018.
Teaching
I was the Teaching Assistant for CS646 Information Retrieval (Fall 2020), a graduate-level course, at UMass Amherst.