About me

I am a fifth year Ph.D. student at Center for Speech and Langauge Processing, Johns Hopkins University. I study natural language processing (NLP), advised by Prof. Benjamin Van Durme.

Before my Ph.D. program, I obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics (primary) and computer science (secondary) at Peking University. I used to work as research interns at Microsoft Research Asia (mentored by Chin-Yew Lin) working on grounded langauge acquisition, Microsoft Semantic Machines (mentored by Anthony Platanios) working on graph nerual networks, and Microsoft Research Lab at Redmond (mentored by Corby Rosset working on large language models. I was a visiting student at Johns Hopkins University in 2018, mentored by Hongyuan Mei and Jason Eisner.

Update: I will join Microsoft Health Futures as a senior researcher. See you in Redmond!

Find my email address here.

My research

I am interested in language representation, especially for long texts. I aim to represent the text in a structured manner rather than token-wise representation like vanilla Transformers. I also work on its applications, such as efficient language models.

In the past, I worked on other fields such as (ordered by reversed time): information extraction, prompting (for which I won the Best Short Paper award in NAACL 2021), time-series analysis, and data-to-text generation.

Walless

I am more known as hiaoxui, who is the founder of WallessPKU. Walless is a platform that helps Chinese netizens to circumvent the Great Firewall. For over 7 years, I have been developing and funding this non-profit project to help tens of thousands people to access the internet without censorship.

My name

My name is 秦光辉 in Chinese. Guang’hui is pronounced like kwang-huei. Qin is like Chin.