Bio

I am now a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Waterloo, working with Prof. Jimmy Lin. Previously, I worked as a Research Assistant Professor (Assistant Researcher) at Nanjing University. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University, working with Prof. Alan Ritter (now in Georgia Tech). I obtained my MS degree from Carnegie Mellon University and my BS degree from Nanjing University.

I conduct research in computational linguistics. I am interested in topics related to social media analysis and computational social science. Recently I also work on applications applied to market research.

Representative Publications

• SmartProbe: A Virtual Moderator for Market Research Surveys
  Josh Seltzer, Jiahua Pan, Kathy Cheng, Yuxiao Sun, Santosh Kolagati, Jimmy Lin, Shi Zong
  arXiv:2305.08271
• Extracting a Knowledge Base of COVID-19 Events from Social Media
  Shi Zong, Ashutosh Baheti, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
  COLING 2022
  [code]
• Flipping the Script: Inverse Information Seeking Dialogues for Market Research
  Josh Seltzer, Kathy Cheng, Shi Zong, Jimmy Lin
  SIGIR 2022 (Industry Track)
  
• Measuring Forecasting Skill from Text
  Shi Zong, Alan Ritter, Eduard Hovy
  ACL 2020
  [code] [talk]
• Analyzing the Perceived Severity of Cybersecurity Threats Reported on Social Media
  Shi Zong, Alan Ritter, Graham Mueller, Evan Wright
  NAACL 2019
  [poster] [demo] [code] [covered by WIRED]
• Get to the Bottom: Causal Analysis for User Modeling
  Shi Zong, Branislav Kveton, Shlomo Berkovsky, Azin Ashkan, Zheng Wen
  UMAP 2017 [Best Paper Candidate]
  [poster] [slides]
• Cascading Bandits for Large-Scale Recommendation Problems
  Shi Zong, Hao Ni, Kenny Sung, Nan Rosemary Ke, Zheng Wen, Branislav Kveton
  UAI 2016
  [poster]

Teaching

• CS 116 Introduction to Computer Science 2 (Spring 2023, University of Waterloo)
• Graduate-level Natural Language Processing (Fall 2021, Nanjing University, with Prof. Jiajun Chen, Prof. Xinyu Dai)

Industry Experiences

Research Intern at Adobe Research
May 2016 - August 2016
Mentor: Dr. Branislav Kveton, Dr. Zheng Wen

Professional Services

Program committee / Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review, ACL (2020-2021), EMNLP (2019-2022), NAACL (2021), EACL (2021), CoNLL (2018-2020), ICML (2020), NeurIPS(2021), ICLR (2021), AAAI (2019-2020), W-NUT (2019-2021)

Misc

I listen to classical music regularly. My favorite composer is J. S. Bach.