Latest News | Web IR NLP Group @ NUS

CIVIC-AI: Stanford's SALT Lab and WING.NUS Collaborate on Social Intelligence and the Future of AI and Work

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The inaugural CIVIC-AI workshop (13–14 July 2026) kicks off a major collaboration between Stanford’s SALT Lab and WING.NUS, bringing together researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies to examine the Social Intelligence of Foundation Models and the Future of AI and Work.

The CIVIC-AI Workshop is an upcoming two-day event in Singapore that will explore the profound societal impacts of AI adoption. The workshop is generously funded by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information of the Republic of Singapore under its AI Visiting Professorship grant, and is also supported by the Ministry of Manpower.

The event centers on three core questions:

Cross-cultural Dimensions: How do cultural context, economic development, and policy environments shape AI adoption and the lived experience of automation across different societies?
Future of Work & Automation: Which professions and tasks are being automated away versus augmented, and who bears the costs of displacement?
Human Advantage: What constitutes irreducible human value when a large fraction of knowledge work can be automated, and how do we measure and support it?

The first day (13 July) focuses on the theme of Social Intelligence, featuring invited talks by researchers such as Yohan Jo, Nancy F. Chen, and Lizi Liao, alongside lightning talks and a panel discussion. The highlight of the day will be a keynote by Diyi Yang from Stanford’s SALT Lab on “Optimizing Human-AI Collaboration,” which will introduce General User Models (GUMs) and Next Action Prediction (NAP) to foster proactive and meaningful human-AI interaction.

The second day (14 July) will center on the Future of Work With AI Agents in Singapore, featuring presentations by Diyi Yang and Min-Yen Kan, followed by extensive discussion sessions to finalize directions and next steps for the collaboration.

Registration for the workshop closes on 6 July 2026. For more details and to register, visit the CIVIC-AI workshop website.

The workshop is made possible by the Singapore Global AI Visiting Professorship (AIVP), an initiative by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information to strengthen Singapore’s AI research capabilities by attracting world-class expertise. Min-Yen Kan (WING.NUS) and Diyi Yang (SALT Lab, Stanford University) are among six NUS Computing faculty teams awarded AIVP grants, for their project “Evaluating and Building Socially Intelligent Foundation Models” — the research collaboration that underpins CIVIC-AI.

WING Receives Singapore AIVP Funding for Socially Intelligent Foundation Models

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Big news from WING: our group at NUS Computing, in collaboration with Prof. Diyi Yang at Stanford, has received funding support under Singapore’s AI Visiting Professorship (AIVP).

The grant supports our collaboration with Prof. Diyi Yang on socially intelligent foundation models, including work that advances their cognitive, situational, and behavioral intelligence.

As AI systems become increasingly integrated into human life, there is a growing need to evaluate and build socially intelligent foundation models that are socially aware and human-centered.

Funded by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, the project, “Evaluating and Building Socially Intelligent Foundation Models,” works toward more trustworthy, human-centered AI. We are excited about what comes next.

Read more: five other professors from the NUS School of Computing were also awarded AIVP grants in the same round, six in all.

Open-source AI for science: OpenScholar and why replicability matters

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Min was quoted in Science on the value of open, replicable AI for research: It’s very important to put this type of open-source research out there because it is replicable."

A Science article reports on OpenScholar, an AI built by the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and five universities to help researchers keep up with the flood of papers (over 4 million in 2024). Unlike general-purpose chatbots, it answers science questions by searching a database of 45 million open-access papers, synthesising multiple sources, and critiquing its own answers to cut down on hallucinated references. In a Nature study, it outperformed GPT-4o and Llama on domain benchmarks and was preferred over human experts in many cases. The team have made the code and data freely available—which Min highlights as crucial for peer review and replicability. The piece also notes caveats: paywalled literature is missing from the corpus, and over-relying on summaries can deskill researchers and obscure nuance. A follow-up model, DR Tulu-8B, was described in a November 2025 preprint.

Min's AAAI workshop keynotes (26–27 Jan 2026)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Min gave two invited keynotes at AAAI 2026 workshops on 26 and 27 January, entitled “The Research Manifold” and “Top 5 trends to watch in the future of IR research (and why they are irrelevant)”. Both talks are now available to watch.

26 Jan — The Research Manifold

Min’s first keynote addressed research principles and open challenges for the community.

Imagine research as a complex, multidimensional vector space where human researchers are partially observable points in this space, with vectors of velocity and acceleration mapping, and where their new discoveries and publications mark observations. This research manifold is now being disrupted by the new entrant of artificially intelligent agents and tools. I describe my thoughts on some of the challenges ahead, as we progress to centaur-like human–AI research teams.

Watch the keynote (workshop page with video).

27 Jan — Top 5 trends to watch in the future of IR research (and why they are irrelevant)

The second keynote highlighted five central themes or open problems in information retrieval.

What are the likely trends in the future of information retrieval for 2026? I discuss five trends, give evidence for their provenance and impact, but you will have heard about many of these trends from previous speakers. Paradoxically, it may be better for some in the field not to follow these trends and I discuss why.

Watch the keynote (YouTube).

For other talks, see other WING conference presentations on our group’s YouTube playlist.

WING is looking for postdoctoral scholars and doctoral students!

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Web, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing (WING) group at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore is actively seeking postdoctoral scholars and doctoral students to start in 2026 across three cutting-edge research areas: AI for Science, LLM Socioethical Alignment, and Fact Checking. WING is led by Associate Professor Kan Min-Yen.

Postdoctoral and Doctoral Student Positions Available at WING Lab, NUS (2026)

Research Areas

AI for Science

We are seeking postdocs interested in cross-disciplinary research, particularly in computational social science and humanities (NUS CSSH). Scholars will collaborate with experts specializing in Southeast Asian studies, public policy, materials science, and computer science topics, fostering innovative approaches to scientific discovery through AI.

LLM Socioethical Alignment

This position involves working with a cross-institutional team spanning NUS and US institutions on cultural and safety alignment of Vision Language Models (VLMs). The project aims to make VLMs more culturally sensitive and personalized for deployment in the multicultural and multilingual environments common throughout Southeast Asia.

Fact Checking

As part of the NUS Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC), scholars will conduct research to help both readers and producers of social media better understand and detect misinformation. The focus is on distinguishing nuance and developing improved information literacy practices.

Postdoctoral Position Qualifications

Successful applicants should demonstrate:

Deep and rigorous research training demonstrated by a doctoral degree in computer science or related area from an advising group well-known for natural language processing, machine learning, digital libraries, and information retrieval research
Strong record of research, often demonstrated by research publications at premier venues, including ACL, SIGIR, ICML, and ICLR
Two or more reference letters from current supervisors or employers

Shortlisted postdoctoral applicants will participate in a comprehensive evaluation process including a job talk, technical interview, a criticial writing assignment, and a interview with the lab head.

Position Details

Location: On-site at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore
Start Date: As soon as possible in 2026
Contract: 3-month probationary period, followed by 2-year contract

Career Development: Mentoring aligned with individual career goals, including opportunities for:

Undergraduate, Masters, and PhD student supervision
Grant writing and proposal development
Classroom teaching experience
Research collaboration and publication

Doctoral Student Qualifications

Deep and rigorous research training demonstrated by a doctoral degree in computer science or related area from an advising group well-known for natural language processing, machine learning, digital libraries, and information retrieval research
Strong record of research, often demonstrated by research publications at international venues

Shortlisted doctoral student applicants will need to pass a criticial writing assignment, a software test and an interview with the lab head. Doctoral applicants must also meet the rigourous admission standards of the School of Computing. If you haven’t yet applied to be part of SoC, we hope that you will consider SoC for your graduate studies, irrespective of whether WING can host your doctoral studies or not. If you are admitted, you can try to contact us again after you arrive in Singapore. If you have questions about graduate studies at SoC NUS, your best bet is to ask our very knowledgeable staff at the graduate office (phd-info@comp.nus.edu.sg). They know the ins and outs of the application process, deadlines and requirements.

Application Process

To apply, please send an email to knmnyn@nus.edu.sg, including “WING” in the subject line, clearly specifying which topic(s) you are applying for.

For postdoctoral candidates, reference letters should be sent directly to the same email address by your referees under separate cover.

Due to the high volume of applications, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. For more information about WING’s research activities and recent publications, visit our lab’s website.

WING places an emphasis on the diversity of our Ph.D. cohort so that the group can benefit from a wider perspective, so WING generally limits the number of students and staff from well-served demographics (e.g., male Chinese students).

ChatGPT 5.2 and Nano Banana was used to create the image. Claude 4 was used to refine the advertisement text.

Jiaying represents iGyro project at NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jiaying helped to represent WING’s interest in the iGyro information resilience project at the NUS Computing networking session recently at NeurIPS 2025.

Jiaying writes: Grateful for the opportunity to represent the NUS Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC) at the first NUS Computing Network Session and Reception during #NeurIPS2025! It was wonderful engaging with brilliant attendees from around the world and sharing CTIC’s research highlights on digital resilience, alongside our amazing NUS Computing faculty and researchers. Kudos to the organizers for putting together such a meaningful and energizing event! 🥳

Bryan Low (the organiser of the NeurIPS 2025 networking session for our School of Computing) also notes the unique “3C"s attributes of our school:

(1) We provide environment & resources to champion bold initiatives & tackle grand challenges. As a result, we can go beyond publications to produce research breakthroughs, societal impact & thought leadership.

(2) We nurture, mentor & cultivate the young generation to be future leaders who will decide the society of the future.

(3) We embrace the kampung spirit that is uniquely Singapore. Imagine a melting pot of diverse global talents coming together to form a community/kampung that is collegial, collaborative, and caring.

Yisong featured as a Vector Institute Intern

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Check out 👀 Yisong Miao’s feature as a Vector Institute research intern in the latest 2025 installment of their news cast. Although he wasn’t able to travel to the institute in 🇨🇦 for the immersive physical part, WING is proud that he was able to participate in the programme while staying on the other side of the world!

Yisong mentored with Vector’s Vered Shwartz to understand why LLMs assume certain contexts and what helps them adapt to different cultures in what was his “most interdisciplinary project ever.” As a Vector intern, Yisong also got to network with IMPACT mentors. We wish him continued success in his research work as he continues his work at WING.

see the original LinkedIn post

WING's CS6101 Retrieval Augmented Generation comes to a successful close at 27th STePS

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

WING ran an experimental section of our CS6101 Exploration of Computer Science Research, as a trial course on Retrieval Augmented Generation.

RAG is now a common gateway experience for the general public as well as students to experience Information Retrieval, a core research area of WING.

The CS6101 course website has publicly-available lecture slides, video lecture recordings and scribe notes for the class’s topics.

These include sections on LLM generation, Retreival, Ranking, RAG Models, Iterative Retrieval and Advanced RAG topics (inclusive of graph, multimodal RAG) and source credibility estimation.

Check out the LinkedIn posts by class participants Vangmay Sachin, Jonathan Chen and Sahej Agrawal.

You can also visit the other WING Events, including past public iterations of WING’s CS6101 sections.

Image enhanced and regenerated via Google’s Nano Banana

LitePruner project awarded VIP@SoC 10K development grant

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sahej’s LitePruner wins a Venture Intiation Programme award of 10,000 SGD to prototype and build out a prototype for commercialisation and use in production large language models!

LitePruner compresses LLM prompts to cut costs and latency. It works across APIs without retraining and preserves accuracy. A prototype targets high-volume enterprise users. Sahej is supervised by Dr Barid Xi Ai.

For the VIP, Sahej will be mentored by Prof. Yan Shuicheng.

About the Venture Initiation Programme at the School of Computing:

Is your idea unique or something that has been tried before? (Check out the past projects here for reference)

Is there a competitive or differentiating edge? How is it different from what already exists and how is it better?

Is there a sizable market and a clearly defined initial target user group for your proposed innovation?

Have you done sufficient research on the market need and competition?

Does the team have the competencies to deliver?

Are you able to demonstrate some early prototypes? (This would be an advantage!)

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Min was quoted in the news feature on Nature Communications: “The important thing is these [AI] tools are going to be here. We need to find the right way of using them”.

In a Nature news feature on “What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks”, writer Ananya quoted joint research work from WING; our collaboration with Univ. of Siegen’s Dr. Joeran Beel on Sakana’s AI Scientist and its promises, challenges and implications for Information Retrieval research.

Read our original pre-print here: Evaluating Sakana’s AI Scientist for Autonomous Research: Wishful Thinking or an Emerging Reality Towards ‘Artificial Research Intelligence’ (ARI)?.

Image generated by ChatGPT 5.

Fact checked: Dr. Xinyuan Lu graduates!

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to Dr. Xinyuan Lu on successfully defending her PhD thesis entitled " Fact-Checking Complex Claims using Large Language Models"!

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Xinyuan Lu has successfully completed her doctoral defense! Her thesis focuses on the complexity in fact-checking systems, especially with respect to claims that require mulit-step and tabular reasoning. Dr. Lu is in the final stages of her job search.

A special thanks to her examiners Profs. See-Kiong Ng (first from the left), Mong-Li Lee (second from left) and Prof. Roger Zimmermann (right).

Learn more about Dr. Lu at her Homepage. You can follow her on X as @ShellyLu00).

Project Check Up's 1 year update

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our Crazy Ideas project, CheckUp: Grounding Social Media on Healthcare with Science, has made strong progress in advancing the dissemination of reliable health information on social media.

We introduced HashView, a benchmark dataset for predicting hashtag popularity, and developed BuzzProphet, a reasoning-augmented framework that combines insights from large language models with lightweight regressors. This research has been accepted at CIKM 2025, highlighting the novelty and relevance of our approach. The project has also contributed to capacity building by supporting one Research Assistant and mentoring two students, including one MComp graduate and one ongoing undergraduate FYP student.

Building on CheckUp’s early findings, we have secured a S$ 100K Ministry of Education Tier 1 grant entitled “Automating Community Note Generation for Social Media Misinformation Governance”. The groundwork laid by CheckUp demonstrated how LLMs can enhance the clarity and contextual relevance of social media content, directly informing the design of this new initiative. While CheckUp focuses on proactive communication of credible information, the Tier 1 project addresses the post-exposure stage of misinformation by developing real-time, AI-driven Community Notes as corrective tools. Together, these efforts form a complementary strategy for reducing the societal harms of health misinformation.

Min's IT:U Keynote: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Getting more out of LLM Prompting

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Min gave an invited talk at the IT:U Summer School on Natural Language Processing based on Do Xuan Long’s papers over the last three years, based on his papers on prompting.

(26 Jul 2025, Linz, Austria)

What does a famine in Malawi have to do with effective prompting? Like William Kamkwamba’s perseverance in bringing electricity and irrigation to his home, we show how a systematic investigation of prompting mechanisms brings about improved performance across many tasks. This talk describes our work to categorise and structure advice on LLM prompting and investigate how details in prompting can positively impact performance on complex, long generation tasks as well as adherence to output formats. Joint work with NTU and A*STAR, Singapore.

Slides: http://soc-n.us/250726-prompt Video: http://soc-n.us/250726-prompt-yt

Min participates in the AI in Educational panel at the IT:U Austria NLP Summer School

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Min gave an opening statement about the importance of socioethical issues in the education process in the age of artificial intelligence.

Here was Min’s opening statement.

I was from a not well-to-do family but an open account left at an internet cafe allowed me access. GPT 7 raised me well, I learned with its guidance and became skilled and respected for commanding AI to better research from a multicultural perspective. I became a student tutor early and continued this into my university education. Sometimes AI gave me feedback sometimes not, but I understood that the "scaffold" was there to help challenge myself, to build myself and resolve; like level design in games — not quite out of reach but certainly a stretch. Now we have our own teaching feedback, our own loss function. My teacher manages me, and I wonder how different it is with me managing my students. I find social justice that being nice and communicating well still serves a good purpose because AI senses that such qualities are helpful in achieving its own goals. I feel a sense of purpose but also a sense that I may have been waylaid into this sense of purpose. Determinism is always at the back of my mind.

Demonstration of Multilingual QA Check to NUS President Tan Eng Chye

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NUS President Tan Eng Chye visited the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, and took part in hands-on demonstrations by members of the iGryo research team. WING-NUS demonstrated our Multilingual QA Check system, which performs Retrieval Augmented Generation and has multilingual capabilities to check claims in local Southeast Asian languages as well as in code-switched (mixed) sentences."

Dr. Victor Li Chuang defends his Ph.D. Thesis!

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Victor Li has successfully defended his PhD thesis titled, “Towards Holistic and Practical Conversational Recommender Systems,” under the co-supervision of A/P Min-Yen Kan and Prof. Haizhou Li, on Thursday, 13 March 2025! He joins the select group of WING.NUS’ doctoral alumni! Congratulations!

Learn more about Dr. Victor Li Chuang at his Homepage. He is currently on the job market!

Celebrating the Success of SSNLP 2024!

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP 2024) was a success, gathering 288 participants from around the world to celebrate the latest in NLP research and innovation.

SSNLP 2024 featured a record-breaking turnout of 288 participants, 7 keynote speakers, and 55 inspiring presentations that highlighted the latest advancements in NLP. Dr. Jiaying Wu, a research fellow from our WING group and this year’s General Chair, led the event’s organization, coordinating efforts across co-organizers, sponsors, industry partners, and volunteers to ensure its success.

For highlights, speaker details, and more from SSNLP 2024, visit the website here. We look forward to continuing the journey at SSNLP 2025!

Jiaying presents recent research on LLMs for Social Simulation

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Jiaying Wu presented the recent research on using LLMs for social simulations at the iGyro meeting.

Dr. Jiaying Wu recently delivered a 30-minute tutorial at the iGyro meeting for NUS Center for Trusted Internet and Communities (CTIC), offering an insightful overview of the latest research on using Large Language Models (LLMs) for social simulations, including applications in predicting elections and their connections to social sciences.

Check out the slides, the full video, reading List.

Follow Jiaying Wu on LinkedIn or X.

Dr. Hengchang Hu defends his Ph.D. Thesis!

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Hengchang Hu has successfully defended his PhD thesis titled, “Going Beyond ID-Based Recommender Systems by Exploiting External Knowledge,” under the supervision of A/P Min-Yen Kan.

Congratulations to Dr. Hengchang Hu! His thesis explores innovative approaches to recommender systems by leveraging external knowledge beyond traditional ID-based methods. We look forward to seeing his continued contributions in the field as he embarks on his next chapter with SAP Singapore in Recommender Systems.

Learn more about Dr. Hengchang Hu Homepage on his work.

Yisong Miao receives the Senior Area Chair Award at ACL 2024!

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to WING members, Yisong Miao, Min-Yen Kan, and their collaborators for winning the Senior Area Chair Award at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) for their paper, “Discursive Socratic Questioning: Evaluating the Faithfulness of Language Models’ Understanding of Discourse Relations.”

Our group is thrilled to announce that we have received a Senior Area Chair Award (Discourse and Pragmatics track) at ACL 2024 for our paper, “Discursive Socratic Questioning: Evaluating the Faithfulness of Language Models’ Understanding of Discourse Relations.” This work, led by our group members Yisong Miao and A/P Min-Yen Kan, in collaboration with Hongfu Liu, Dr. Wenqiang Lei, and Dr. Nancy Chen, introduces a novel scoring framework that leverages LLMs in a Socratic style, testing models on targeted questions, counterfactuals, and converse questions.

Learn more about this paper.

Congratulations, Dr. Taha Aksu!

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to Dr. Taha Aksu on successfully defending his PhD thesis titled, “Task-Oriented Dialogue Understanding and Evaluation using Minimal Data.”

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Taha Aksu has successfully completed his PhD defense! His thesis focused on advancing task-oriented dialogue systems through efficient understanding and evaluation with minimal data. Dr. Aksu now joins Salesforce AI in Singapore, and we look forward to seeing his future achievements.

A special thanks to his examiners Prof. Tat-Seng Chua (first from the left), A.P. Brian Lim (second from the left), A/P Ye Wang (top right), and I2R co-supervisor Dr. Nancy Chen (third from the left) along with all of his supporters along the way!

Learn more about Dr. Taha Aksu Homepage on his work.