News

• Very humbled to receive the Rutgers CSGSS Best Professor Award, along with Yongfeng Zhang, in the Teaching, Advising, and Overall categories. At this point, I am not really sure I deserve this award, but I will consider this an additional reason to work hard and live up to the award in the future.
  
  
• Congratulations to Tugba Kulahcioglu for her Nomination for Best Paper at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, Laguna Hills, CA, 2018.
  
  
• I am happy to be serving as PC Co-Chair for the Language, Data and Knowledge conference (LDK 2019), together with Maria Eskevich. Also, I am co-organizing the Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Technologies (DL4KGS) at ESWC 2018 and serving as Workshop Co-Chair for the 13th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2019).
  
  
• Congratulations to Xiang Long for winning the ActivityNet 2017 Kinetics challenge! Find out more about the details of the approach in our arXiv paper.
  
  
• Congratulations to Xiang Long for winning the 3rd Prize ($20,000) in the Google Cloud & YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge! Find out more about the details of the approach in our AAAI 2018 paper.
  
  
• Our deep neural information retrieval model PACRR was the backbone for the top-ranked TREC 2017 Complex Answer Retrieval submissions!
  
  
• Congratulations to Qian Yang for receiving a Google Women Techmakers Scholarship!
  
  
• Just found out that Google Translate is using our OpenWN-PT project. Great to see our work contributing to helping people understand each other.
  
  
• Dear Students: Please contact me if you are interested in research projects related to web mining, natural language processing, or machine learning!

Curriculum Vitae

• Prior to joining Rutgers, I was an Assistant Professor heading the Web Mining and Language Technology group at Tsinghua University, which is generally considered mainland China's #1 Science & Engineering university, and ranks 2nd in the world in the U.S. News & World Report Computer Science ranking 2016/2017, 14th in the world in the Times Higher Education World University Reputation Ranking 2018, and 25th in the world in the QS World University Ranking. This was as part of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, which is led by Turing award winner Andrew Yao and conducts interdisciplinary computer science and quantum computing research.
  
  
• Before that, I spent two years as a post-doctoral research scholar at UC Berkeley working in the AI/FrameNet group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). I also spent 4 months at the Machine Learning and Perception Group (headed by Christopher Bishop) at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working with Thore Graepel and Gjergji Kasneci.
  
  
• Prior to that, I was a member of the Databases and Information Systems Group headed by Gerhard Weikum at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, receiving my doctoral degree from Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany in 2010.
  
  
• Citizenship: German

Team and Research Foci

I am currently leading a team of 9 PhD students, plus a few master's students and undergraduates. My group was formerly known as the Web Mining and Language Technology group at Tsinghua University. We conduct interdisciplinary research in computer science and beyond. The vision driving this research is the idea that there is now so much digital data out there that machines ought to be able to learn to guide us in almost every aspect of our daily life, e.g. by addressing our information needs and helping us make more informed decisions. This, however, requires novel algorithms that simultaneously learn and integrate information from multiple heterogeneous data sources in order to make sense of human language and more generally of the world. More specifically, my research interests include: Data Mining, Graph Algorithms, and Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing Big Data Approaches to Web and Text Mining Data Integration, Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Technologies, Information Retrieval Multilingual and cross-lingual natural language processing Join us! Get in touch with me if you are seeking PhD or Post-Doc opportunities at one of the top universities for computer science research, located in the Greater New York region, which is currently one of the most exciting areas for artificial intelligence and data science in the world. More details.

Awards and Recognition

• Rutgers Computer Science Graduate Student Society's Best Professor Award, along with Yongfeng Zhang
  in the Teaching, Advising, and Overall categories, 2017–2018
  
  
• Best Paper Award (out of 945 full paper submissions)
  19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010) [certificate]
  
  
• Best Paper Award
  International Conference on Global Interoperability for Language Resources (ICGL 2008) [picture]
  
  
• Best Paper Award
  NAACL 2015 Workshop on Vector Space Modeling for NLP (sponsored by Google DeepMind and TextKernel)
  
  
• Best Paper Honorable Mention
  52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014)
  
  
• Best Student Paper Nominee (top 3)
  ESWC 2015
  
  
• Best Paper Nominee (with Tugba Kulahcioglu)
  12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, Laguna Hills, CA, 2018
  
  
• Best Demonstration Award (with Johannes Hoffart, Fabian Suchanek, Klaus Berberich, Edwin Lewis-Kelham, Gerhard Weikum)
  20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011)
  
  
• Nominee for Best German/Swiss/Austrian Computer Science Dissertation 2010 (GI-Dissertationspreis 2010)
  
  
• Dr. Eduard Martin Prize
  awarded for best Saarland University dissertations across all disciplines
  
  
• Outstanding Reviewer
  NAACL-HLT 2018
  
  
• Best Reviewer Award
  PIKM 2012 (5th Workshop for Ph.D. Students at ACM CIKM 2012) [certificate]
  
  
• DARPA Grant: 2017--
  Co-P.I., SocialSim program ($2,029,752)
  
  
• Samsung Research Grant: 2016/7
  P.I. (with Samsung Co-P.I.)
  
  
• National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant: 2016
  P.I., Grant #61550110504
  
  
• Microsoft Research Visiting Researcher Program: 2014
  Microsoft Research Asia-funded collaboration
  
  
• National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant: 2014-2015
  P.I., Grant #61450110088
  
  
• Tsinghua 221 Talent Program (2014)
  
  
• Post-Doctoral Research Grant: 2011-2013
  DAAD
  
  
• Scholarship (Doctoral Studies): 2007-2010
  IMPRS-CS
  
  
• Scholarship (Foreign Studies): 2004-2005, Université de Montréal, Canada
  German National Academic Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
  
  
• Scholarship (Merit): 2003-2006
  German National Academic Foundation / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
  
  
• Scholarship (Online Scholarship): alumnus
  e-fellows.net
  
  

Projects and Downloads

• UWN/MENTA: One of the largest multilingual knowledge graphs, transforming the well-known WordNet database into a massively multilingual resource covering over 1 million words and several million named entities in a single semantically organized hierarchy. Our derivative project OpenWN-PT is being used by Google Translate.
  
  
• Lexvo.org: Contributes information about words and other language-related entities to the Linked Data Web and Semantic Web, leading to a Web of Data in which the British Library, the Spanish National Library, and others have linked their data to Lexvo.org, and Lexvo.org in turn connects its own data to other valuable resources.
  
  
• YAGO-SUMO Integration: An ontology providing an enormous body of axiomatized world knowledge based on YAGO as well as the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). YAGO was used in IBM's famous Jeopardy!-winning system Watson.
  
  
• FrameBase: FrameBase uses frame semantics, a theory of natural language semantics, to represent knowledge about the world in a consistent way. I also developed a new browsing interface for the FrameNet lexical resource, which FrameBase relies on.
  
  
• WebChild: Large amounts of common-sense knowledge extracted from the Web.
  
  
• SPASS-XDB: Online interface to the SPASS-XDB reasoning system, which combines state-of-the-art theorem proving with support for large-scale knowledge sources
  
  
• MTRoget: Thesauri in many languages, obtained by translating Roget's Thesaurus using task-specific statistical techniques
  
  
• Etymological Wordnet: A database of etymological and derivational relationships between words in different languages, mined from Wiktionary.
  
  
• PEAK: Pyramid Evaluation of summary quality using Automated Knowledge extraction — A method for evaluating the quality of a summary (e.g., one written by students) using the Pyramid method, which is known to be significantly more reliable than the ROUGE method when evaluating individual summaries.
  
  
• Other resources
  • Wikipedia IMDb Mappings: Mappings between Wikipedia articles and corresponding Internet Movie Database entries (Download)
  • GD View: File Viewer (for DOS) supporting over 400 different file formats.

Selected Publications

• A Helping Hand: Transfer Learning for Deep Sentiment Analysis  BibTeX
  Xin Dong, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. ACL 2018.
  Acceptance rate: 24.9%
  
  
• Generating Fine-Grained Open Vocabulary Entity Type Descriptions  BibTeX   Website
  Rajarshi Bhowmik, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. ACL 2018.
  Acceptance rate: 24.9%
  
  
• Video Captioning with Multi-Faceted Attention  BibTeX
  Xiang Long, Chuang Gan, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) 6, 2018, p. 173-184.
  
  
• Attention Clusters: Purely Attention Based Local Feature Integration for Video Classification  BibTeX
  Xiang Long, Chuang Gan, Gerard de Melo, Jiajun Wu, Xiao Liu, Shilei Wen (2018)
  In: Proc. CVPR 2018.
  🏆  Backbone of winning solution in ActivityNet 2017 Kinetics Challenge
  Acceptance rate: 29.6%
  
  
• Cross-Lingual Propagation for Deep Sentiment Analysis  BibTeX
  Xin Dong, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. AAAI 2018. AAAI Press.
  Acceptance rate: 25%
  
  
• Link Prediction via Subgraph Embedding-Based Convex Matrix Completion  BibTeX
  Zhu Cao, Linlin Wang, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. AAAI 2018. AAAI Press.
  Acceptance rate: 25%
  
  
• Multimodal Keyless Attention Fusion for Video Classification  BibTeX
  Xiang Long, Chuang Gan, Gerard de Melo, Xiao Liu, Yandong Li, Fu Li, Shilei Wen (2018)
  In: Proc. AAAI 2018. AAAI Press.
  🏆  Backbone of 3rd place ($20,000 prize) solution in the Google Cloud & YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge
  Acceptance rate: 25%
  
  
• Co-PACRR: A Context-Aware Neural IR Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval  BibTeX   Website
  Kai Hui, Andrew Yates, Klaus Berberich, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. WSDM 2018. ACM.
  Acceptance rate: 16%
  
  
• Addressing Structural and Linguistic Heterogeneity in the Web  BibTeX   Website
  Jacobo Rouces, Gerard de Melo, Katja Hose (2018)
  AI Communications 31:1, 2018, p. 3-18. IOS Press.
  
  
• Predicting Semantic Signatures of Fonts  BibTeX   Website
  Tugba Kulahcioglu, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. 12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing.
  🏆  Best Paper Nominee
  
  
• Metaphor Suggestions based on a Semantic Metaphor Repository  BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  
  
• FontLex: A Typographical Lexicon based on Affective Associations  BibTeX   Website
  Tugba Kulahcioglu, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  
  
• Exploring Semantic Properties of Sentence Embeddings (Short Paper)  BibTeX
  Xunjie Zhu, Tingfeng Li, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. ACL 2018.
  Acceptance rate: 24.9%
  
  
• Public Opinion Spamming: A Model for Content and Users on Sina Weibo (Short Paper)  BibTeX
  Ziyu Guo, Liqiang Wang, Yafang Wang, Guohua Zeng, Shijun Liu, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. WebSci 2018. ACM.
  
  
• Context-Based Few-Shot Word Representation Learning (Short Paper)  BibTeX
  Chenxing Li, Gerui Wang, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. 12th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing.
  
  
• Opinion Mining of Public Reactions on Ordinances  BibTeX
  Manish Puri, Xu Du, Aparna Varde, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. IEEE ICTAI 2018. IEEE.
  
  
• Social Media vs. News Media: Analyzing Real-world Events from Different Perspectives (Short Paper)  BibTeX
  Liqiang Wang, Ziyu Guo, Yafang Wang, Zeyuan Cui, Shijun Liu, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. DEXA 2018. Springer Verlag.
  
  
• Five Shades of Untruth: Finer-Grained Classification of Fake News (Poster Paper)  BibTeX
  Liqiang Wang, Yafang Wang, Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2018)
  In: Proc. ASONAM 2018.
  
  
• Mapping Ordinances and Tweets using Smart City Characteristics to Aid Opinion Mining  BibTeX
  Manish Puri, Xu Du, Aparna Varde, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. WWW 2018 Workshop on Social Sensing and Enterprise Intelligence (SSEI 2018). ACM.
  
  
• Visualizing Multi-Document Semantics via Open Domain Information Extraction  BibTeX   Website
  Yongpan Sheng, Zenglin Xu, Yafang Wang, Xiangyu Zhang, Jia Jia, Zhonghui You, Gerard de Melo (2018)
  In: Proc. ECML-PKDD 2018 (Demonstration Paper). Springer.
  
  
• Multiple-Weight Recurrent Neural Networks  BibTeX
  Zhu Cao, Linlin Wang, Gerard de Melo (2017)
  In: Proc. IJCAI 2017.
  Acceptance rate: 26%
  
  
• Should Algorithms for Random SAT and Max-SAT be Different?  BibTeX
  Sixue Liu, Gerard de Melo (2017)
  In: Proc. AAAI 2017. AAAI Press.
  Acceptance rate: 24.6%
  
  
• A Position-Aware Deep Model for Relevance Matching in Information Retrieval  BibTeX   Code
  Kai Hui, Andrew Yates, Klaus Berberich, Gerard de Melo (2017)
  In: Proc. EMNLP 2017. ACL.
  🏆  Backbone of winning TREC 2017 Complex Answer Retrieval Competition submission
  Acceptance rate: 26%
  
  
• HiText: Text Reading with Dynamic Salience Marking  BibTeX
  Qian Yang, Yong Cheng, Sen Wang, Gerard de Melo (2017)
  In: Proc. WWW 2017 (Digital Learning Track). ACM.
  
  
• Inducing Conceptual Embedding Spaces from Wikipedia  BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo (2017)
  In: Proc. WWW 2017 (Cognitive Computing Track). ACM.
  
  
• Multimodal Question Answering over Structured Data with Ambiguous Entities  BibTeX
  Huadong Li, Yafang Wang, Gerard de Melo, Changhe Tu, Baoquan Chen (2017)
  In: Proc. WWW 2017 (Cognitive Computing Track). ACM.
  
  
• Enabling Participatory Design of 3D Virtual Scenes on Mobile Devices  BibTeX
  Xiaowen Sun, Yafang Wang, Gerard de Melo, Wei Gai, Yuliang Shi, Lu Zhao, Yulong Bian, Juan Liu, Chenglei Yang, Xiangxu Meng (2017)
  In: Proc. WWW 2017 (Games, Simulations and Interactive Environments Track). ACM.
  
  
• FrameBase: Enabling Integration of Heterogeneous Knowledge  BibTeX   Website
  Jacobo Rouces, Gerard de Melo, Katja Hose (2017)
  Semantic Web 8:6, 2017, p. 817-850. IOS Press.
  Impact factor: 2.889 (2017)
  
  
• Commonsense Knowledge in Machine Intelligence  BibTeX
  Niket Tandon, Aparna Varde, Gerard de Melo (2017)
  SIGMOD Record December, 2017.
  
  
• Link Prediction by Exploiting Network Formation Games in Exchangeable Graphs  BibTeX
  Liqiang Wang, Yafang Wang, Bin Liu, Lirong He, Shijun Liu, Gerard de Melo, Zenglin Xu (2017)
  In: Proc. IJCNN 2017.
  
  
• RE-PACRR: A Context and Density-Aware Neural Information Retrieval Model  BibTeX   Code
  Kai Hui, Andrew Yates, Klaus Berberich, Gerard de Melo (2017)
  In: Proc. Neu-IR 2017 SIGIR Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval. ACM.
  
  
• WebChild 2.0: Fine-Grained Commonsense Knowledge Distillation  BibTeX
  Niket Tandon, Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2017)
  In: Proc. ACL 2017 (Demonstration Paper). ACL.
  
  
• Relation Classification via Multi-Level Attention CNNs  BibTeX
  Linlin Wang, Zhu Cao, Gerard de Melo, Zhiyuan Liu (2016)
  In: Proc. ACL 2016.
  Acceptance rate: 25.4%
  
  
• PEAK: Pyramid Evaluation via Automated Knowledge Extraction  BibTeX   Website   Slides
  Qian Yang, Rebecca J. Passonneau, Gerard de Melo (2016)
  In: Proc. AAAI 2016. AAAI Press.
  Acceptance rate: 26%
  
  
• WebBrain: Joint Neural Learning of Large-Scale Commonsense Knowledge  BibTeX   Website
  Jiaqiang Chen, Niket Tandon, Charles Darwis Hariman, Gerard de Melo (2016)
  In: Proc. ISWC 2016.
  Acceptance rate: 18% (Research Track)
  
  
• Seeing is Believing: The Quest for Multimodal Knowledge  BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo, Niket Tandon (2016)
  ACM SIGWEB Newsletter Spring 2016, 2016. ACM.
  
  
• Lexvo.org: Language-Related Information for the Linguistic Linked Data Cloud  BibTeX   Website
  Gerard de Melo (2015)
  Semantic Web 6:4, 2015, p. 393-400. IOS Press.
  Impact factor: 1.786 (2016)
  
  
• WebChild: Harvesting and Organizing Commonsense Knowledge from the Web  BibTeX   Website
  Niket Tandon, Gerard de Melo, Fabian M. Suchanek, Gerhard Weikum (2014)
  In: Proc. ACM WSDM 2014. ACM.
  Acceptance rate: 18%
  
  
• Taxonomic Data Integration from Multilingual Wikipedia Editions  BibTeX
  Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2014)
  Knowledge and Information Systems 39:1, 2014, p. 1-39. Springer Verlag.
  Impact factor: 1.782 (2014)
  
  
• Towards a Universal Wordnet by Learning from Combined Evidence  BibTeX   Website   Slides
  Gerard de Melo, Gerhard Weikum (2009)
  In: Proc. 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009). ACM.
  Acceptance rate: 14.5%
  
  

Public Lectures and Invited Talks

Professional Activities

Teaching

Misc.

• Memberships: ACL, ACM, IEEE, GI, BCS-IRSG, ACL SIGLEX, GWA
• Profiles: LinkedIn profile, Twitter, FOAF file, URI, ORCID
• Programming Languages: Scala, Java, C#, C++, Python, etc.
• Other Interests:
  • philosophy of language (LinkedIn group, general LinkedIn group)
  • metaphysics
  • epistemology (LinkedIn group)
  • learning languages
  • lexical semantics
  • philosophy of mind (LinkedIn group)
• Erdős Number: 3
• Please support: Kiva social lending