Maximillian L. Chen
I am a 4th-year PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Columbia University advised by Zhou Yu.
✉️ maxchen AT cs DOT columbia DOT edu
Research Interest: Multi-turn Conversational Modeling and Spoken Dialogue Systems
I received my Bachelors at Cornell University, where I worked with Prof. Lillian Lee and Dr. Jack Hessel, Prof. Rene Kizilcec, and Prof. Joe Guinness.
My PhD is supported by a GFSD fellowship.
I completed my Candidacy Exam on Multiparty Conversation Modeling. You can find the talk slides here.
Links: Google Scholar, Twitter, LinkedIn
Employment
- Google (August 2023 - Present) - PhD Student Researcher, Cloud AI Research
- Amazon Science (April - July 2023) - Research/Applied Scientist Intern, Alexa AI
- Amazon Science (May - October 2022) - Research/Applied Scientist Intern, Alexa AI
- Microsoft (May - August 2020) - Software Engineer Intern, Excel - Data Visualization and Experiences
- Morgan Stanley (June - August 2019) - Technology Summer Analyst, Enterprise Visualization and Analytics
- RapidRatings (June - August 2018) - Analytics Intern, Analytics & Coverage
Publications
[16] M. Chen, R. Sun, S.O. Arik, T. Pfister Learning to Clarify: Multi-turn Conversations with Action-Based Contrastive Self-Training
Preprint. Under Review at ICLR 2025
[15] K. Qian, M. Chen, S. Li, A. Sharma, Z. Yu Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts
Under Review at NAACL 2025
[14] M. Zhou, L. Zhang, S. Horng, M. Chen, K.H. Huang, S.F. Chang M2-TabFact: Multi-Document Multi-Modal Fact Verification With Visual and Textual Representations of Tabular Data
Under Review at NAACL 2025
[13] K. Qian, S. Wan, C. Tang, Y. Wang, X. Zhang, M. Chen, Z. Yu VarBench: Robust Language Model Benchmarking Through Dynamic Variable Perturbation
EMNLP 2024 Findings
[12] Researchers from Kitware, Columbia, UT Austin, UC Berkeley ANGEL: Real-Time Mixed Reality Task Guidance
CVPR 2024 Demos
[11] X. Yu, M. Chen, Z. Yu Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Policy Planning
EMNLP 2023
[10] M. Chen, Z. Yu Pre-Finetuning for Few-Shot Emotional Speech Recognition
INTERSPEECH 2023
[9] M. Chen, X. Yu, W. Shi, U. Awasthi, Z. Yu Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting
ACL 2023
[8] M. Chen, A. Papangelis, C. Tao, S. Kim, A. Rosenbaum. Y. Liu, Z. Yu, D. Hakkani-Tur PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis
EACL 2023 Findings
[7] M. Chen*, C. Chen*, X. Yu* and Z. Yu FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric
EACL 2023
[6] M. Chen, A. Papangelis, C. Tao, A. Rosenbaum, S. Kim, Y. Liu, Z. Yu, D. Hakkani-Tur Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Through Prompting for Dialogue Understanding
SyntheticData4ML @ NeurIPS 2022
[5] M. Chen, W. Shi, F. Yan, R. Hou, J. Zhang, S. Sahay and Z. Yu Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialogue
AACL-IJCNLP 2022
[4] R. Kizilcec, M. Chen, K. Jasinska, M. Madaio and A. Ogan Mobile Learning During School Disruptions in Sub-Saharan Africa
AERA Open Vol. 7 No. 1 (Special Topic Collection on Educational Data Science)
[3] M. Chen and R. Kizilcec Return of the Student: Predicting Re-Engagement in Mobile Learning
Educational Data Mining 2020
[2] R. Kizilcec and M. Chen Student Engagement in Mobile Learning via Text Message
ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale 2020
[1] J. Guinness, D. Bhattacharya, J. Chen, M. Chen, and A. Loh An Observational Study of the Effect of Nike Vaporfly Shoes on Marathon Performance
RESEARCHERS.ONE
Education
Teaching
- TA: COMS 6998, Conversational AI - Fall 2022 (Columbia)
- TA: COMS 4156, Advanced Software Engineering - Fall 2021 (Columbia)
- TA: CS 4300, Language & Information - Spring 2021 (Cornell)
- TA: CS 4780/5780, Machine Learning for Intelligent Systems - Fall 2020 (Cornell)
- TA: INFO 5200, Learning Analytics - Fall 2019 (Cornell)
- TA: INFO 2950, Intro to Data Science - Spring 2019, 2020 (Cornell)
Academic Service
- Organizer: SICon @ ACL - 2023
- Reviewer: ICASSP - 2024
- Reviewer: ACL - 2023
- Reviewer: EMNLP - 2023, 2022
- Reviewer: Synthetic Data for ML/Gen AI - NeurIPS 2023, NeurIPS 2022
- Reviewer: Conversational AI for NLP - ACL 2023
- Reviewer: Language Resources and Evaluation Journal - Current
- Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review - Current