Silei Xu

Hi! I am a research scientist at Zoom. I obtained my Ph.D degree from the Stanford Computer Science Department under the supervision of Prof. Monica Lam in 2023. Before Stanford, I received my M.Phil. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) under the supervision of Prof. John C.S. Lui and my B.Eng. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

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Address: 55 Almaden Blvd, Suite 6, San Jose, CA 95113
Email: silei {dot} xu {at} zoom {dot} us

Education

• Computer Science Department, Stanford University
  Sep 2015 - Aug 2023, Ph.D. in Computer Science

• Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  Aug 2012 - Nov 2014, M.Phil. in Computer Science and Engineering

• School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China
  Aug 2008 - Jul 2012, B.Eng. in Computer Science

Publications

• Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidata
  Silei Xu*, Shicheng Liu*, Theo Culhane, Elizaveta Pertseva, Meng-Hsi Wu, Sina J. Semnani, Monica S. Lam (*: equal contribution)
  In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023

• A Few-Shot Semantic Parser for Wizard-of-Oz Dialogues with the Precise ThingTalk Representation
  Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Ryan Kearns, Lucas Jun Koba Sato, Silei Xu, Monica S. Lam
  In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022

• ThingTalk: An Extensible, Executable Representation Language for Task-Oriented Dialogues
  Monica S. Lam, Giovanni Campagna, Mehrad Moradshahi, Sina J. Semnani, Silei Xu
  arXiv preprint 2022

• AutoQA: From Databases To Q&A Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data
  Silei Xu*, Sina J. Semnani*, Giovanni Campagna, and Monica S. Lam (*: equal contribution)
  In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020

• Localizing Q&A Semantic Parsers for Any Language In a Day
  Mehrad Moradshahi, Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Silei Xu, Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020

• Schema2QA: High-Quality and Low-Cost Q&A Agents for the Structured Web
  Silei Xu, Giovanni Campagna, Jian Li, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2020

• Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
  Giovanni Campagna*, Silei Xu*, Mehrad Moradshahi, and Monica S. Lam (*: equal contribution)
  In Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2019

• Controlling Fine-Grain Sharing in Natural Language with a Virtual Assistant
  Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Rakesh Ramesh, Michael Fischer, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT, presented at UbiComp), 2018

• Brassau: Automatically Generating Graphical User Interfaces for Virtual Assistant
  Michael Fischer, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. (MobileHCI), 2018

• Almond: The Architecture of an Open, Crowdsourced, Privacy-Preserving, Programmable Virtual Assistant
  Giovanni Campagna, Rakesh Ramesh, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2017

• Product Selection Problem: Improve Market Share by Learning Consumer Behavior
  Silei Xu and John C.S Lui
  In ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 2016

• Product Selection Problem: Improve Market Share by Learning Consumer Behavior
  Silei Xu and John C.S Lui
  In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2014 [presentation video]
  (Invited to the special issue of TKDD as best papers of KDD'14 (9/151))

• A Provable Algorithmic Approach to Product Selection Problems for Market Entry and Sustainability
  Silei Xu, Yishi Lin, Hong Xie and John C.S. Lui
  In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM), 2014

• Single Disk Failure Recovery for X-code-based Parallel Storage Systems
  Silei Xu, Runhui Li, Patrick P.C. Lee, Yunfeng Zhu, Liping Xiang, Yinlong Xu, John C.S. Lui
  In IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), 2013