Zhenyun Deng

I finished my PhD thesis from School of Computer Science, University of Auckland in September 2022. I have been fortunate to be advised by Prof. Michael Witbrock and Dr. Patricia Riddle. Before that, I received M.S. in Computer Science from Guangxi Normal University, advised by Prof. Shichao Zhang.

I was a reasearch assistant at Strong AI Lab (SAIL) at UoA. Prior to UoA, I previously worked as an NLP engineer in CNKI, Beijing. See CV for more information.

Email  /  Google Scholar  /  Github  / 

• Interpretable AI, Question Answering, Fact Checking
• Natural Language Understanding/Reasoning, Graph Neural Networks
• Deep Learning Applications in NLP, Continual/Lifelong Learning, Machine Learning, Causal Inference, etc.

• 03/2023: I completed my PhD Oral at the University of Auckland. Thesis Committee: William Cohen and Isabelle Augenstein
• 09/2022: I completed my PhD study from School of Computer Science, University of Auckland.
• 09/2022: Our paper "TaKG: A New Dataset for Paragraph-level Table-to-Text Generation Enhanced with Knowledge Graphs" was accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2022.
• 08/2022: Our paper "Prompt-based Conservation Learning for Multi-hop QA" was accepted to COLING 2022.
• 07/2022: Our paper "Multi-Step Deductive Reasoning Over Natural Language: An Empirical Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalisation" was accepted to IJCLR-NeSy 2022.
• 05/2022: Our paper "Explicit Graph Reasoning Fusing Knowledge and Contextual Information for Multi-hop QA" was accepted to NAACL-DLG4NLP 2022.
• 04/2022: Our paper "Interpretable AMR-Based Question Decomposition for Multi-hop QA" was accepted to IJCAI-ECAI 2022.
• 12/2021: Our paper "Multi-scale Graph Fusion for Co-saliency Detection" was accepted to AAAI 2021.
• Earlier news
07/2018: Our paper "A novel kNN algorithm with data-driven k parameter computation" was accepted to Pattern Recognition Letters.
01/2018: Our paper "Sparse sample self-representation for subspace clustering" was accepted to Neural Computing and Applications.
08/2017: Our paper "Leverage triple relational structures via low-rank feature reduction for multi-output regression" was accepted to Multimedia Tools and Applications.
06/2016: Our paper "Efficient kNN classification algorithm for big data" was accepted to Neurocomputing.
12/2014: Our paper "kNN Algorithm with Data-Driven k Value" was accepted to International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA).

• 
  Aug 2022 - Feb 2023, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
  Research assistant at Strong AI Lab
• 
  Spet 2016 - Sept 2018, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, 中国知网), Beijing, China.
  NLP Engineer at Big Data Analysis Group

We propose the Prompt-based Conservation Learning (PCL) framework for multi-hop QA, which acquires new knowledge from multi-hop QA tasks while conserving old knowledge learned on single-hop QA tasks, mitigating forgetting.

We propose a Question Decomposition method based on Abstract Meaning Representation (QDAMR) for multi-hop QA, which achieves interpretable reasoning by decomposing a multi-hop question into simpler subquestions and answering them in order.

We describe a structured Knowledge and contextual Information Fusion GNN (KIFGraph) whose explicit multi-hop graph reasoning mimics human step by step reasoning.

We introduce IMA-GloVe-GA, an iterative neural inference network for multi-step reasoning expressed in natural language.

We propose a new co-saliency detection framework which includes two strategies to improve the discriminative ability of the features.

• Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Auckland, 2022
     Fundamentals of Database Systems (CS351/SE351/CS751).
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Auckland, 2020
     Fundamentals of Database Systems (CS351/SE351/CS751).

• PhD Thesis Writing Award, 2022
  
• Computer Science Graduate Student Travel Fund, 2022
  
• New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission Fund, 2022
  
• PhD Research Project Scholarship, 2018
  
• China National Scholarship, 2015
  
• Graduate Student Full Scholarship, 2013
  

Conference Reviewer: ACL/EMNLP/NAACL Area Chair, IJCAI, AAAI, ACMMM, CIKM 2022, ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
Journal Reviewer: Neurocomputing