Hi! I'm Ralph.


I'm a machine learning engineer at Comcast Labs, working on speech and language technology. I publish under the guidance of Jimmy Lin at the junction of natural language processing, speech recognition, and deep learning.

I've served as a reviewer for AAAI, AACL-IJCNLP, EMNLP, a CVPR workshop, and an ICML workshop.

Papers

2020
Howl: A Deployed, Open-Source Wake Word Detection System
Raphael Tang*, Jaejun Lee*, Afsaneh Razi, Julia Cambre, Ian Bicking, Jofish Kaye, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
*Equal contribution.
Covidex: Neural Ranking Models and Keyword Search Infrastructure for the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset
Edwin Zhang, Nikhil Gupta, Raphael Tang, ..., Kyunghyun Cho, Hui Fang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
Exploring the Limits of Simple Learners in Knowledge Distillation for Document Classification
Ashutosh Adhikari, Achyudh Ram, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
ACL 2020 Repl4NLP Workshop
Showing Your Work Doesn't Always Work
Raphael Tang, Jaejun Lee, Ji Xin, Xinyu Liu, Yaoliang Yu, Jimmy Lin
ACL 2020
DeeBERT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating BERT Inference
Ji Xin, Raphael Tang, Jaejun Lee, Yaoliang Yu, Jimmy Lin
ACL 2020
Rapidly Bootstrapping a Question Answering Dataset for COVID-19
Raphael Tang, ..., Phuong Cam, Kyunghyun Cho, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
2019
Machine Learning for Streamflow Prediction: Current Status and Future Prospects
Martin Gauch, Raphael Tang, Juliane Mai, Bryan Tolson, Shervan Gharari, Jimmy Lin
AGU Fall Meeting 2019
The Runoff Model-Intercomparison Project over Lake Erie and the Great Lakes
Juliane Mai, ..., Jimmy Lin, Raphael Tang
AGU Fall Meeting 2019
What Would Elsa Do? Freezing Layers During Transformer Fine-Tuning
Jaejun Lee, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
Explicit Pairwise Word Interaction Modeling Improves Pretrained Transformers for English Semantic Similarity Tasks
Yinan Zhang, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
Natural Language Generation for Effective Knowledge Distillation
Raphael Tang, Yao Lu, Jimmy Lin
EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 DeepLo Workshop
Incorporating Contextual and Syntactic Structures Improves Semantic Similarity Modeling
Linqing Liu, Wei Yang, Jinfeng Rao, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
Honkling: In-Browser Personalization for Ubiquitous Keyword Spotting
Jaejun Lee, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 Demo
Challenges and Opportunities in Understanding Spoken Queries Directed at Modern Entertainment Platforms
Ferhan Ture, Jinfeng Rao, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
SIRIP 2019
DocBERT: BERT for Document Classification
Ashutosh Adhikari, Achyudh Ram, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
Distilling Task-Specific Knowledge from BERT into Simple Neural Networks
Raphael Tang*, Yao Lu*, Linqing Liu*, Lili Mou, Olga Vechtomova, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
*Equal contribution.
Yelling at Your TV: An Analysis of Speech Recognition Errors and Subsequent User Behavior on Entertainment Systems
Raphael Tang, Ferhan Ture, Jimmy Lin
SIGIR 2019
Universal Voice-Enabled User Interfaces using JavaScript
Jaejun Lee, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
IUI 2019 Demo
Rethinking Complex Neural Network Architectures for Document Classification
Ashutosh Adhikari*, Achyudh Ram*, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
NAACL 2019
*Equal contribution.
2018
Streaming Voice Query Recognition Using Causal Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks
Raphael Tang, Gefei Yang, Hong Wei, Yajie Mao, Ferhan Ture, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
FLOPs as a Direct Optimization Objective for Learning Sparse Neural Networks
Raphael Tang, Ashutosh Adhikari, Jimmy Lin
NIPS 2018 Workshop on Compact Deep Neural Networks with Industrial Applications
Progress and Tradeoffs in Neural Language Models
Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
JavaScript Convolutional Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting in the Browser: An Experimental Analysis
Jaejun Lee, Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
Adaptive Pruning of Neural Language Models for Mobile Devices
Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv
An Experimental Analysis of the Power Consumption of Convolutional Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting
Raphael Tang, Weijie Wang, Zhucheng Tu, Jimmy Lin
ICASSP 2018
Deep Residual Learning for Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting
Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
ICASSP 2018
2017
Honk: A PyTorch Reimplementation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting
Raphael Tang, Jimmy Lin
arXiv

Work Experience

Machine Learning Engineer
Comcast
Aug 2020–Present
  • Develop machine learning models for speech and language technology on the X1 entertainment platform.
Research Contractor
Comcast
Oct 2018–Dec 2019
  • Conducted research on improving voice query search on the X1 enter-tainment platform.
Research Intern
Comcast
May 2018–Aug 2018
  • Designed speech recognition model currently in production to serve millions of voice queries per day on the X1 entertainment platform.
  • Worked with team to code, test, and deploy the system.
Software Developer
Vitameter
Aug 2014–Aug 2015
  • Envisioned, designed, and programmed Android application.
  • Designed $25,000- and $10,000-winning pitch and video.

Projects