Huifang Du - Tongji University

Introduction

Hi! My name is Huifang Du. I’m a Ph.D. candidate at Tongji University under the supervision of Haofen Wang. My research interests include KBQA, Task-Oriented Dialogue, and Human-Centered Dialogue.

Education

• Ph.D. Advanced Technology and Design, Tongji University, 2020, supervised by Prof. Haofen Wang.
• M.Eng. Information Technology, China Agricultural University, 2017, supervised by Prof. Ming Zhao.
• B.Sc. Geographic Information System, Shanxi Agricultural University, 2011.

Work Experience

• Jan. 2024 - Jul. 2024: Visiting Researcher at Monash University, supervised by Prof. Yuan-Fang Li.
• Nov. 2021 - Jun. 2023: Research Intern at BMW, supervised by Dr. Xixie Zhang.
• Jul. 2017 - Aug. 2020: Research Engineer at Memect, supervised by Dr. Jie Bao.

Selected Publications

• Huifang Du, Xuejing Feng, Jun Ma, Meng Wang, Shiyu Tao, Yijie Zhong, Yuan-Fang Li, and Haofen Wang. Towards proactive interactions for in-vehicle conversational assistants utilizing large language models. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024, pages 7850–7858.
• Lingyuan Liu, Huifang Du, Xiaolian Zhang, Mengying Guo, Haofen Wang, Meng Wang. A Question-Answering Assistant over Personal Knowledge Graph. InProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 2024 Jul 10 (pp. 2708-2712).
• Huifang Du, Shuqin Li, Minghao Wu, Xuejing Feng, Yuan-Fang Li, Haofen Wang. Rewarding What Matters: Step-by-Step Reinforcement Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue. EMNLP Findings. 2024 Jun 20.
• Huifang Du, Shiyu Tao, Xuejing Feng, Jun Ma, Haofen Wang. From Passive to Active: Towards Conversational In-Vehicle Navigation Through Large Language Models. InInternational Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2024 Jun 15 (pp. 159-172).
• Huifang Du, Xixie Zhang, Meng Wang, Yunwen Chen, Daqi Ji, Jun Ma, Haofen Wang. A contrastive framework for enhancing knowledge graph question answering: alleviating exposure bias. Knowledge-Based Systems. 2023 Nov 25;280:110996.
• Haofen Wang, Huifang Du, Guilin Qi, Huajun Chen, Wei Hu, Zhuo Chen. Construction of a linked data set of COVID-19 knowledge graphs: development and applications. JMIR Medical Informatics. 2022 May 13;10(5):e37215.
• Huifang Du, Zhongwen Le, Haofen Wang, Yunwen Chen, Jing Yu. COKG-QA: Multi-hop question answering over COVID-19 knowledge graphs. Data Intelligence. 2022 Jul 1;4(3):471-92.