Research Interests

My primary research interests are in solving different text processing problems with the help of machine learning. Currently I am working on problems related to semantic similarity and relevance for online advertising and Web search.

News

• I will serve as an area co-chair for NAACL-HLT-2012.
• We have released the Wikipedia dataset used in our CoNLL-2011 and EMNLP-2010 papers.
• We received a CoNLL-2011 Best Paper Award for our paper entitled "Learning Discriminative Projections for Text Similarity Measures".

Selected Publications by Topics

Below is the list of some of my recent papers categorized by the topic. The complete list of my publications is also available.

Semantic Similarity and Relevance

• Clickthrough-Based Latent Semantic Models for Web Search, with J. Gao & K. Toutanova. In SIGIR-11.
• Learning Discriminative Projections for Text Similarity Measures. W. Yih, K. Toutanova, J. Platt & C. Meek. In CoNLL-11. [Best Paper]
• Similarity Models for Ad Relevance Measures. W. Yih & N. Jiang. In MLOAD-10.
• Translingual Document Representations from Discriminative Projections. J. Platt, K. Toutanova & W. Yih. In EMNLP-10.
• Adaptive Near-Duplicate Detection via Similarity Learning. H. Hajishirzi, W. & A. Kolcz,  In SIGIR-10.
• Learning Term-weighting Functions for Similarity Measures. W. Yih. In EMNLP-09.
• Consistent Phrase Relevance Measures. W. Yih and C. Meek. In ADKDD-08.
• Improving Similarity Measures for Short Segments of Text. W. Yih and C. Meek. In AAAI-07.
• Finding Advertising Keywords on Web Pages. W. Yih, J. Goodman & V. Carvalho. In WWW-06. 

Domain Adaptation 

• Domain Adaptation with Ensemble of Feature Groups. R. Samdani and W. Yih. In IJCAI-11.

Spam Filtering and Email Applications

• Extracting Product Information from Email Receipts Using Markov Logic. S. Kok & W. Yih. In CEAS-09.
• Partitioned Logistic Regression for Spam Filtering. M. Chang, W. Yih & C. Meek. In KDD-08.
• Personalized Spam Filtering for Gray Mail. M. Chang, W. Yih & R. McCann. In CEAS-08.
• Raising the Baseline for High-Precision Text Classifiers. A. Kolcz & W. Yih. In KDD-07.
• Improving Spam Filtering by Detecting Gray Mail. W. Yih, R. McCann & A. Kolcz. In CEAS-07.
• Learning at Low False Positive Rates. W. Yih, J. Goodman & G. Hulten. In CEAS-06.
• Online Discriminative Spam Filter Training. J. Goodman & W. Yih. In CEAS-06.

Document Summarization

• Multi-Document Summarization by Maximizing Informative Content-Words. W. Yih, J. Goodman, L. Vanderwende & H. Suzuki. In IJCAI-07.

Integer Linear Programming (ILP) Inference

• Integer Linear Programming Inference for Conditional Random Fields, with D. Roth. In ICML-05. 
• A Linear Programming Formulation for Global Inference in Natural Language Tasks, with D. Roth. In CoNLL-04.

Structured Output Learning

• Improved Discriminative Bilingual Word Alignment. R. Moore, W. Yih & Andreas Bode. In ACL-COLING-06.
• Learning and Inference over Constrained Output, with V. Punyakanok, D. Roth & D. Zimak. In IJCAI-05.
• Probabilistic Reasoning for Entity & Relation Recognition, with D. Roth. In COLING-02.

Semantic Role Labeling

• Automatic Semantic Role Labeling (Tutorial Handout for AAAI-07). W. Yih & K. Toutanova.
• Automatic Semantic Role Labeling (Tutorial Handout for HLT-NAACL-06). W. Yih & K. Toutanova.
• The Importance of Syntactic Parsing and Inference in Semantic Role Labeling. In Computational Linguistics 2008, with V. Punyakanok & D. Roth.
• Generalized Inference with Multiple Semantic Role Labeling Systems. CoNLL-05 (shared task), with P. Koomen, V. Punyakanok & D. Roth.
• The Necessity of Syntactic Parsing for Semantic Role Labeling. IJCAI-05, with V. Punyakanok & D. Roth.
• Semantic Role Labeling via Integer Linear Programming Inference. COLING-04, with V. Punyakanok, D. Roth & D. Zimak.
• Semantic Role Labeling via Generalized Inference over Classifiers, with V. Punyakanok, D. Roth, W. Yih, D. Zimak & Y. Tu. In CoNLL-04 (shared task).

Information Extraction

• Relational Learning via Propositional Algorithms: An Information Extraction Case Study, with D. Roth. In IJCAI-01.
• Template-Based Information Mining from HTML Documents. J.Hsu & W. Yih. In AAAI-97.

Academic Services

Conference/Workshop Organizer

• CEAS-09 Program Co-chair
• ICML-07 Workshop on Constrained Optimization and Learning with Structured Outputs

Program Committee Member

• Senior Program Committee: IJCAI-09, AAAI-11
• CEAS: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 (Program Co-chair), 2010
• ICML: 2006, 2008, 2009
• NIPS: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
• AAAI: 2006, 2008, 2011 (SPC)
• IJCAI: 2009 (SPC)
• ACL: 2007, 2008 (w/ HLT), 2009 (w/ IJCNLP), 2010, 2011 (w/ HLT)
• EMNLP: 2005, 2007 (w/CoNLL) ,2008, 2010, 2011
• HLT-NAACL: 2004, 2009, 2010
• CIKM-08, CoNLL-09, ILPNLP-WS-09