I am a PhD student at UCL NLP, co-supervised by Prof. Pontus Stenetorp and Prof. Sebastian Riedel. I was affiliated with Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithm (MILA), and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII).

My primary research interest is Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Selected Publications

Please check the full list of my publications here.

Strings from the Library of Babel: Random Sampling as a Strong Baseline for Prompt Optimisation
Yao Lu, Jiayi Wang, Raphael Tang, Sebastian Riedel and Pontus Stenetorp
NAACL 2024

Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity
Yao Lu, Max Bartolo, Alastair Moore, Sebastian Riedel and Pontus Stenetorp
ACL 2022 (Outstanding Paper Award, 0.2% out of 3000+ submissions)

Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles
Yao Lu, Yue Dong and Laurent Charlin
EMNLP, 2020
[slides] [dataset][appendix]

Discrete Optimization for Unsupervised Sentence Summarization with Word-Level Extraction
Raphael Schumann, Lili Mou, Yao Lu, Olga Vechtomova and Katja Markert
ACL, 2020

A Multi-task Learning Framework for Abstractive Text Summarization
Yao Lu, Linqing Liu, Zhile Jiang, Min Yang and Randy Goebel
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI, student poster), 2019

Distilling Task-Specific Knowledge from BERT into Simple Neural Networks
Yao Lu*, Raphael Tang*, Linqing Liu*, Lili Mou, Olga Vechtomova and Jimmy Lin (equal contribution, order flipped)
arxiv pre-print, 2019

Experiences