I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Heng Ji as a member of the Blender NLP lab.

My research aims to equip machines with deep semantic understandings of multimodal information. What happens? Who? When? Where? Why? are the fundamental questions asked to comprehend the overwhelming amount of information, regardless of whether presented as text, images, or videos. I aim to evolve traditional Entity-Centric Single-Modalitiy Knowledge to Event-centric Multi-Modality Knowledge, including:
(1) understanding multimodal event semantic structures to answer What happened?, Who?, Where?, and When? (Knowledge Extraction): We bring event argument (participant) semantics into vision-language pretraining (CLIP-Event), which has supported zero-shot joint Multimedia Event Extraction (M²E² for the first time;
(2) understanding temporal dynamics to answer What will happen next? and Why? (Knowledge Reasoning): We introduce Event Graph Schema, which opens doors to a global event graph context capturing participant-specific and temporally ordered event information;
(3) applying Event Knowledge Graph (Knowledge-Driven Applications): We show positive results on long-standing open problems, such as timeline generation, meeting summarization, question answering.

Bio: Her work on multimedia knowledge extraction won the Best Demo Paper Award at ACL’20, and the work on COVID multimedia knowledge extraction won the Best Demo Paper Award at NAACL’21. She was selected as a DARPA Riser (nominated by DARPA) and a EE CS Rising Star in 2022. She was a recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship in 2021. She was awarded C.L. Dave and Jane W.S. Liu Award, and has been selected as Mavis Future Faculty Fellow. She has more than 30 publications on multimedia knowledge extraction and reasoning, and gave tutorials about multimedia IE at ACL’21, AAAI’21 and NAACL’22. She serves as a senior PC member at IJCAI and PC members for ARR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING, IJCAI, AAAI, etc.

I am on job market for faculty positions! [CV]
Please feel free to drop me an email manling2@illinois.edu.

News

• [2022-10] Will present at EE CS Rising Star workshop in UT Austin on Oct 25-26 as a Riser.
• [2022-10] Will present at DARPA Forward event in OSU on Oct 4-5 as a DARPA Riser.
• [2022-07] Will give a tutorial at NAACL T3: New Frontiers of Information Extraction at 9:00–12:30 on July 10th (Location: Columbia D) with Muhao Chen, Lifu Huang, Ben Zhou, Heng Ji and Dan Roth. Welcome to our tutorial!
• [2022-05] I am thrilled to be selected as a DARPA Riser! Thanks DARPA!
• [2022-03] Our work on COVID-KG is reported by the department Illinois CS Papers Earn Top Honors at Conferences.
• [2022-03] I am nominated as a DARPA Riser by DARPA.
• [2021-10] I am thrilled to receive Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship! Thanks Microsoft!
• [2021-08] Did a tutorial at ACL 2021 about Event-centric Natural Language Processing with Muhao, Qiang, Hongming, Heng, Kathy and Dan.
• [2021-06] Our COVID-KG was awarded as Best Demo Paper at NAACL 2021.
• [2021-06] Our work of knowledge extraction and reasoning has been reported by the department Manling Li Produces Award-winning Event Schema Research with Advisor and Mentor Heng Ji.
• [2021-05] Awarded C.L. and Jane Liu Award for showing exceptional research promise.
• [2021-04] Selected as Mavis Future Faculty Fellow.
• [2021-02] Did a tutorial at AAAI 2021 about Event-centric Natural Language Understanding with Muhao, Qiang, Hongming, Heng and Dan.
• [2020-10] Ranked 1st in TAC Streaming Multimedia Knowledge Base Population (SM-KBP) 2020.
• [2020-08] Our GAIA multimedia IE system has been awarded as Best Demo Paper at ACL 2020.
• [2019-06] Invited to present our event-tracking demo at DARPA Demo Day and ARL Transition Day.
• …

Education

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2023 (expected)
  • Advisor: Prof. Heng Ji
  • Thesis Title: Structural Event Knowledge Acquisition from Multimedia Data
  • Thesis Committee: Heng Ji, Kyunghyun Cho, Shih-Fu Chang, Jiawei Han, Chengxiang Zhai
• Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computing Technology
  • M.S. in Computer Science, 2018
  • Advisor: Prof. Yuanzhuo Wang
• University of Science and Technology Beijing
  • B.E. in Computer Science (Internet of Things), 2015
  • B.M. in Information Management and Information Systems (minor), 2012 - 2015

Experience

• 05/2021 - 12/2021, Microsoft Research Redmond
  • Research Intern
  • Mentor: Ruochen Xu. I am happy to work with Shuohang Wang, Luowei Zhou, Chenguang Zhu.
  • Focus: Vision-Language Pretraining with Event Knowledge
• 06/2020 - 08/2020, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
  • Research Intern
  • Mentor: Tengfei Ma, Mo Yu. I am happy to work with Lingfei Wu and Tian Gao.
  • Focus: Graph Compession via Optimal Transport

Academic Service

Senior Program Committee:

• IJCAI, 2021

Program Committee:

• ARR (ACL Rolling Review, from 2021)
• ACL (from 2021)
• EMNLP (from 2021)
• NAACL-HLT (from 2021)
• AAAI (from 2021)
• WWW (from 2021)
• AKBC (2021)
• EACL (from 2021)
• KDD DI Workshop (2021)
• NLPCC (2021)
• COLING (from 2020)
• AACL (from 2020)
• CCL (from 2020)

Journal Reviewer:

• IEEE MultiMedia
• Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
• Journal of Advances in Information Technology

Misc

**Books **Baking **My Cat