Research Focus
Ziyu Yao has broad interests in natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and their applications to other disciplines. In particular, she has been working on developing natural language interfaces (e.g., question answering and dialogue systems) that can reliably assist humans in knowledge acquisition and task completion. Her current foci include: (1) Human-AI Interaction, where she aims to endow AI agents the ability to proactively collaborate with and learn from humans during decision making, (2) The Interplay between Natural and Programming Language, such that humans can easily communicate with computers for task completion, and (3) Efficient NLP/AI, i.e., building machine learning models with limited human supervision and machine power, towards democratizing AI techniques. Yao is passionate about and has been working on generalizing NLP/AI techniques to disciplines such as clinical informatics, software engineering, etc..
