Bio.

Hello! I am an assistant professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence of Monash, and an affiliated lecturer of University of Cambridge (Language Technology Lab). I am also the deputy director of the Master of AI program at Monash.

I lead a team of students working on predictive models for language (text and speech). In the more distant past, I worked on integrating nonparametric models and compressed data structures for predictive models on large volumes of text. More recently, I worked on multilingual NLP and Bayesian learning of neural models with their application in low-resource conditions. Since 2020 I have been working on various speech and text models in understanding, translation, and reasoning tasks. While in principle the solutions we investigate are agnostic to the underlying models, we leverage foundational large language models (for text and speech) as much as possible. We have also been investigating various shortcomings of foundaiton models.

Research Areas in Language and Text.

• Probing and Augmenting Reasoning with LLMs (verification, symbolic grounding)
• Red teaming safety in foundation models for text and speech
• Self-supervised learning (e.g., applications in text, speech, and graph)
• Utilising graphs for knowledge intensive tasks (e.g., graph-to-text generation, applications in biomedical domain)
• Deep generative models (e.g., generation, semi-supervised learning, sparsity and disentanglement)
• Bayesian learning and inference (e.g., applications in training with small data)

News.

• ☘ Congratulations to Yinhong for his work on logical alignment of LLMs being accepted to ICML25 Spotlight!
• ☘ Gave a talk at The Future of Technology & The Legal Industry event.
• ☘ Congratulations to Hao for his work on audio red teaming being accepted to NAACL25!
• ☘ Congratulations to Matthew and Ramya for the Outstanding Paper Award from ALTA24!
• ☘ Excited to be serving as a Senior Area Chair in ACL2025!
• ☘ Co-organized Monash GenAI Masterclass in 2024.
• ☘ Several papers accepted in 2024: COLM, 3xACL/-Findings, 3xEMNLP/-Findings, 1xNAACL, 2xEACL/-Findings
• ☘ Co-organized The 2nd Monash Interdisciplinary Workshop on Language!
• ☘ Several papers accepted in 2023: CogSci, 3xEMNLP-/EACL-Findings/Demonstrations, Interspeech, CoNLL
• ☘ Served as Area Chairs in EMNLP2023, EACL2023, and AACL2023!
• ☘ Excited to be launching the Koala project! Read more here.
• ☘ Excited for the release of Visual Med-Alpaca Bridging Modalities in Biomedical Language Models!
• ☘ Co-organized The 1st Monash Interdisciplinary Workshop on Language!
• ☘ Several papers accepted in 2022: 3xACL, 1xEMNLP, 3xEMNLP-/NAACL-Findings, 1xInterspeech
• ☘ Co-organized The 3rd Deep Learning for Low Resource NLP (DeepLo) Workshop, co-located with NAACL2022
• ☘ Victor Prokhorov successfully defended his PhD thesis on Injecting Inductive Biases into Distributed Representations of Text.
• ☘ Several papers accepted in 2021: 1xACL, 1xEACL, 1xNAACL, 2xEMNLP, 2xRepL4NLP

Future Students.

I am looking for self-motivated Ph.D students to work on any of the above topics or related areas (you may also want to check my publications in the last 2-3 years). You can use this link and check if you meet the deadline and minimum requirement to apply for scholarships from Monash.