Hoifung Poon

Address:
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052, U.S.A.

Email: <first name > at microsoft dot com
Website: research.microsoft.com/~hoifung

I am a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. My research interest is in advancing machine learning and natural language processing to automate discovery in genomics and precision medicine. My most recent work focuses on scaling semantic parsing to Pubmed for extracting biological pathways, and on developing probabilistic methods to incorporate pathways with high-throughput genomics data in cancer system biology. I have received Best Paper Awards in NAACL, EMNLP, and UAI.

Check out the Literome Project, a repository for automatically curated knowledge from Pubmed. Currently, it features associations between genotypes and phenotypes, such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) vs. disease predisposition or drug reaction, which are useful for genomics research such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

I spent some truly amazing years in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. My Ph.D. advisor is Pedro Domingos. My dissertation is: Markov Logic for Machine Reading.

Publications

Grounded Unsupervised Semantic Parsing. [Paper]
Hoifung Poon.
In Proceedings of the Fifty First Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2013.

Probabilistic Frame Induction. [Paper]
Jackie Cheung, Hoifung Poon and Lucy Vanderwende.
In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2013.

An Exhaustive Epistatic SNP Association Analysis on Expanded Wellcome Trust Data. [Paper]
Christoph Lippert, Jennifer Listgarten, Robert Davidson, Scott Baxter, Hoifung Poon, Carl M. Kadie, David Heckerman.
In Scientific Reports, 2013, doi:10.1038/srep01099.

Sum-Product Networks: A New Deep Architecture. [Paper] [Slides] [Download code and results]
Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, (UAI), 2011.
Acceptance rate: 34%. (Plenary acceptance: 9%)
Best Paper Award

Unsupervised Ontology Induction from Text. [Paper] [Slides]
Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos.
In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2010.
Acceptance rate: 25%.

Joint Inference for Knowledge Extraction from Biomedical Literature. [Paper] [Slides]
Hoifung Poon and Lucy Vanderwende.
In Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies Conference (NAACL-HLT), 2010.
Acceptance rate: 31%.

Unsupervised Semantic Parsing. [Paper] [Slides] [Download data and code]
Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2009.
Acceptance rate: 20%.
Best Paper Award

Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation with Log-Linear Models. [Paper] [Slides]
Hoifung Poon, Colin Cherry, and Kristina Toutanova.
In Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies Conference (NAACL-HLT), 2009.
Acceptance rate: 29%.
Best Paper Award

Language ID in the Context of Harvesting Language Data off the Web. [Paper]
Fei Xia, William Lewis and Hoifung Poon.
In Proceedings of the Conference of European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2009.
Acceptance rate: 28%.

Joint Unsupervised Coreference Resolution with Markov Logic. [Paper]
Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2008.
Acceptance rate: 20%.

A General Method for Reducing the Complexity of Relational Inference and its Application to MCMC. [Paper]
Hoifung Poon, Pedro Domingos, and Marc Sumner.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2008.
Acceptance rate: 24%.

Markov Logic. [Book Chapter]
Pedro Domingos, Stanley Kok, Daniel Lowd, Hoifung Poon, Matthew Richardson, Parag Singla.
In L. De Raedt, P. Frasconi, K. Kersting and S. Muggleton (eds.), Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming, 2008.

Joint Inference in Information Extraction. [Paper] [Online Appendix]
Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2007.
Acceptance rate: 27%.

Sound and Efficient Inference with Probabilistic and Deterministic Dependencies. [Paper] [Slides]
Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2006.
Acceptance rate: 21%.

Unifying Logical and Statistical AI. [Paper]
Pedro Domingos, Stanley Kok, Hoifung Poon, Matthew Richardson, Parag Singla.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2006.
Invited paper.

Tutorial

I gave a tutorial in NAACL-2010 on Markov logic in natural language processing. Here are the slides.

Software

Sum-Product Networks

Unsupervised Semantic Parsing

The Alchemy System for Statistical Relational AI

Last modified: May, 2013