Xiang Dai (戴翔)

[CV-full]     [CV-1 page]

I am currently a research scientist at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.

My main research interest lies in natural language processing. My earlier work focused on information extraction, especially identifying entities (e.g., ACL 20) and relations from unstructured text and linking these entities to corresponding ontologies. In the medical domain, one example is active surveillance in pharmacovigilance: I developed models to detect descriptions of adverse drug events in patient‑written online posts. I also created datasets (e.g., JBI 24) and organised shared tasks (e.g., ALTA 25) on mapping these layman descriptions to their standard terms in MedDRA, a medical dictionary used for regulatory purposes.

These days, my research is more centered on building cost‑effective domain‑specific large language models (e.g., EMNLP 20) that excel at understanding specialized text, such as clinical notes, scientific publications, and technical documents. I also work on human‑centric AI (e.g., TOCHI 23), building systems that adapt to a user’s background and specific information needs. These systems help people make informed decisions (for example, enabling a biologist to navigate scientific literature and simulation results to decide which genes to investigate for a particular trait) or follow instructions (for example, helping a patient understand their health records so they can follow their health advice).

A full list of my publications can be found on the Publications page or on Google scholar.

News

• 2026-02: We are organizing the 2nd Workshop on Evaluation for Multimodal Generation. It will be held in Melbourne, Australia on July 24 as part of SIGIR2026.
• 2025-08: Sim's paper 'The More, The Better? A Critical Study of Multimodal Context in Radiology Report Summarization' was accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2025.
• 2025-07: We are organizing a shared task at ALTA 2025, focusing on normalizing adverse drug event descriptions in social media posts to MedDRA.
• 2025-06: I received an Early Career Researcher Award from the Analytics and Decision Sciences program at Data61.
• 2025-05: I gave a guest lecture at Macquarie University on domain-specific VLMs.
• 2025-05: Sim's paper 'Can VLMs Actually See and Read? A Survey on Modality Collapse in Vision-Language Models' was accepted to Findings of ACL 2025.
• 2025-04: I gave a guest lecture at the University of New South Wales on active adverse event surveillance.
• 2025-01: I became a member of the ALTA (Australasian Language Technology Association) executive committee for 2025-2026.
• 2024-11: Our paper 'MultiADE: A Multi-domain Benchmark for Adverse Drug Event Extraction' was accepted to Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
• (more)

Email

dai (dot) xiang (dot) au (at) gmail.com

dai (dot) dai (at) csiro.au

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