Yu (Hope) Hou

Find me: [Twitter] [GitHub] [LinkedIn] [Google Scholar] [Email] (houyu [at] usc [dot] edu)

Hi there! 👋 I am a software engineer at Flourish Science, a start-up formed by a motivated and inspired team to help people live a happier and more meaningful life.

I earned my master’s degree from University of Southern California, where I worked with Prof. Nanyun Peng on natural language processing (NLP) research. I will also pursue my PhD later at University of Maryland, College Park, working with Prof. Rachel Rudinger and Prof. Hal Daumé III.

Broadly, I am interested in human-centered trustworthy and socially aware NLP. I am passionate about learning language from society perspectives and exploring intersections between linguistics and psychology.

Currently, I am learning how to make AI help people think positively. 🌿

Publications

Preprint

Jiao Sun*, Yu Hou*, Jiin Kim and Nanyun Peng
Investigating the Helpfulness of Information-Seeking Dialogue Systems and its Fairness Implication

AACL'22

Sunipa Dev*, Emily Sheng*, Jieyu Zhao*, Aubrie Amstutz*, Jiao Sun, Yu Hou, Mattie Sanseverino, Jiin Kim, Akihiro Nishi, Nanyun Peng and Kai-Wei Chang
On Measures of Biases and Harms in NLP [paper]

ACL'21 (Findings)

Shikhar Singh*, Nuan Wen*, Yu Hou, Pegah Alipoormolabashi, Te-lin Wu, Xuezhe Ma and Nanyun Peng
COM2SENSE: A Commonsense Reasoning Benchmark with Complementary Sentences [paper] [in BIG-bench tasks]

INTERSPEECH'20

Qingjian Lin, Yu Hou and Ming Li
Self-Attentive Similarity Measurement Strategies in Speaker Diarization [paper]

Education

Jan 2020 - Dec 2021

University of Southern California, MSc in Computer Science

Sep 2015 - June 2019

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, BSc (Eng)

Experience

May 2023 -

Software Engineer , Flourish Science (Mountain View, CA)

Apr 2022 - Jan 2023

Software Engineer , Google, I18N NLP Localization team (Mountain View, CA)

May 2021 - Aug 2021

Software Dev Engineer Intern, Amazon, AWS EC2 PrivateLink team (Seattle, WA)

Sept 2019 - Dec 2019

Research Intern, Duke Kunshan University, SMIIP Lab led by Prof. Ming Li (Kunshan, China)

Teaching

Fall 2021, Spring 2021

Teaching Assistant for CSCI 455x: Introduction to Programming Systems Design at University of Southern California

Fall 2019 (Session 2)

Teaching Assistant for STATS102: Introduction to Data Science at Duke Kunshan University