Hey, I’m Shayne!

I am an Machine Learning Scientist starting my PhD at the Center for Constructive Communication at MIT with Prof. Deb Roy in the Fall. My research focuses on Natural Language Processing, applied to informational, social, and (soon) civic challenges.

Prior, I was an Applied ML Scientist at Apple, a reasercher at Stanford NLP lab (2017), advised by Chris Manning and Danqi Chen, and at Salesforce Research (2016), under the supervision of Caiming Xiong and Richard Socher. I completed a BA in Economics (2016) and MS in Computer Science (2018) at Stanford University.

I’m also very interested in the role of antitrust and law in regulating new technologies. In my free time I enjoy soccer, reading philosophy, creative writing, and learning new languages.

Recent News

• 2021.08: Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering is accepted to EMNLP 2021. [Dataset/Code.]

• 2021.06: Our 26 language evaluation set Multilingual Knowledge Questions and Answers was accepted to TACL 2021. [Dataset/Code.]

• 2021.05: Evaluating Entity Disambiguation and Popularity in Retrieval-Based NLP accepted to ACL 2021. [Dataset/Code.]

• 2021.05: 2 NAACL 2021 papers! Interpretability in QA and the “QReCC” Dataset – used in the SCAI Workshop Competition.

• 2021.01: Comparison of Question Rewriting Methods for Conversational Passage Retrieval accepted to ECIR 2021!

• 2020.11: Our analysis paper at SCAI in EMNLP 2020 won Best Paper Award!

• 2020.10: Query Rewriting for Conversational QA paper accepted as Oral to WSDM 2021!

• 2020.10: New Short Paper at Findings of EMNLP 2020! Mentioned in Seb Ruder’s NLP Newsletter!