Phu Mon Htut (Phu)

Phu Mon Htut (Phu)

PhD student
New York University

May 2022 Update: I finally defended my dissertation!
I’m a Data Science PhD candidate at New York University and a member of ML² Group at CILVR, co-advised by Prof. Sam Bowman and Prof. Kyunghyun Cho. I’m broadly interested in deep learning and natural language understanding. These days, I mainly work on applying transfer learning and multi-task learning methods to NLP problems, and analyzing these methods to understand why and when they work/fail.

Previously, I interned at AWS AI, Facebook AI Research, and Grammarly.
Prior to NYU, I developed Information Retrieval systems at Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore. Before that, I earned my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Nanyang Technological University.

Publications

* equal contribution

2022

  • BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering
    Alicia Parrish, Angelica Chen, Nikita Nangia, Vishakh Padmakumar, Jason Phang, Jana Thompson, Phu Mon Htut, Samuel R Bowman.
    ACL. 2022.
    [ArXiv]

2021

  • Comparing Test Sets with Item Response Theory
    Clara Vania*, Phu Mon Htut*, William Huang*, Dhara Mungra, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Jason Phang, Haokun Liu, Kyunghyun Cho, Samuel R. Bowman.
    ACL. 2021.
    [Paper]

2020

  • Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning with Pretrained Models for Natural Language Understanding: When and Why Does It Work?
    Yada Pruksachatkun*, Jason Phang*, Haokun Liu*, Phu Mon Htut*, Xiaoyi Zhang, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Clara Vania, Katharina Kann, Samuel R. Bowman.
    ACL. 2020.
    [ArXiv]

  • English Intermediate-Task Training Improves Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Too
    Jason Phang*, Iacer Calixto*, Phu Mon Htut, Yada Pruksachatkun, Haokun Liu, Clara Vania, Katharina Kann, Samuel R. Bowman.
    AACL-IJCNLP. 2020.
    [ArXiv]

  • jiant: A Software Toolkit for Research on General-Purpose Text Understanding Models
    Yada Pruksachatkun*, Phil Yeres*, Haokun Liu, Jason Phang, Phu Mon Htut, Alex Wang, Ian Tenney, Samuel R. Bowman.
    ACL. 2020. (Demo track)
    [ArXiv][jiant library]

2019

  • Do Attention Heads in BERT Track Syntactic Dependencies?
    Phu Mon Htut*, Jason Phang*, Shikha Bordia*, and Samuel R. Bowman.
    Natural Language, Dialog and Speech (NDS) Symposium, The New York Academy of Sciences. 2019. (Extended Abstract).
    [Paper] [Poster] [Blog]

  • Investigating BERT’s Knowledge of Language: Five Analysis Methods with NPIs.
    Alex Warstadt*, Yu Cao*, Ioana Grosu*, Wei Peng*, Hagen Blix*, Yining Nie*, Anna Alsop*, Shikha Bordia*, Haokun Liu*, Alicia Parrish*, Sheng-Fu Wang*, Jason Phang*, Anhad Mohananey*, Phu Mon Htut*, Paloma Jeretic* and Samuel R. Bowman.
    EMNLP. 2019.
    [ArXiv]

  • The Unbearable Weight of Generating Artificial Errors for Grammatical Error Correction.
    Phu Mon Htut, Joel Tetreault.
    The Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA), ACL. 2019.
    [Paper]

  • Inducing Constituency Trees through Neural Machine Translation.
    Phu Mon Htut, Kyunghyun Cho, Samuel R. Bowman.
    Preprint. 2019.
    [ArXiv] [Blog]

  • Generalized Inner Loop Meta-Learning.
    Edward Grefenstette, Brandon Amos, Denis Yarats, Phu Mon Htut, Artem Molchanov, Franziska Meier, Douwe Kiela, Kyunghyun Cho, Soumith Chintala.
    Preprint. 2019.
    [ArXiv][higher library]

2018

  • Grammar Induction with Neural Language Models: An Unusual Replication.
    Phu Mon Htut, Kyunghyun Cho, Samuel R. Bowman.
    EMNLP. 2018.
    The Workshop on the Analysis and Interpretation of Neural Networks for NLP (Blackbox-NLP). 2018. (Extended abstract)
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Code/Output-Parses]

  • Training a Ranking Function for Open-Domain Question Answering.
    Phu Mon Htut, Samuel R. Bowman, Kyunghyun Cho.
    NAACL: Student Research Workshop. 2018.
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Poster]

Teaching

TA for:

  • DS-GA 1012: Natural Language Understanding and Computational Semantics, NYU (Spring-2020, Spring-2021)
  • Sequence-to-sequence learning Tutorial, African Master’s Program in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) (2020)
  • DS-GA 1011: Natural Language Processing with Representation Learning, NYU (Fall-2018)

Service

Outreach

Miscellaneous

  • You can refer to me as she/they. I’m queer non-binary.

  • I’m originally from Yangon, Myanmar(Burma).

  • You can call me “Phu” (h sound is silent for both my first and last name). Fun fact: I don’t have a family name.