About me

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Center for Speech and Language Processing, Johns Hopkins University. I study natural language processing (NLP), and I am 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 a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia (mentored by Chin-Yew Lin) working on grounded language acquisition, Microsoft Semantic Machines (mentored by Anthony Platanios) working on graph neural 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. 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, 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 of 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.