Brendan King

he/him -- PhD Student at University of California, Santa Cruz - bking2 (at) ucsc (dot) edu

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I’m a fourth year PhD student in Natural Language Processing, working with Prof. Jeffrey Flanigan. My research is focused on dialogue understanding, interactive systems, few-shot NLP methods, and continual learning.

Previously, I was a software engineer at Apptio, and before that a computational research intern at the Institute for Systems Biology, where I helped develop methods for automatic metabolic reconstruction of microbes with Prof. Nathan Price. I also completed my BS in computer science at University of Washington. Outside of work and research I enjoy hiking, mountaineering, skiing and otherwise being outdoors!

news

Jul 25, 2025 Our work “In Search of the Lost Arch in Dialogue: A Dependency Dialogue Acts Corpus for Multi-Party Dialogues” will be presented at ACL 2025 (findings)! [paper] [corpus & codebook]
Oct 09, 2024 I’ll be presenting our recent work at Baylearn and the UCSC AI student research symposium!
Sep 20, 2024 Our work “Unsupervised End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue with LLMs: The Power of the Noisy Channel” will be presented at EMNLP 2024! [paper] [code]
Jul 08, 2023 Our work “Diverse Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Dialogue State Tracking” will be presented at Findings of the ACL, 2023! [paper] [code]
Dec 22, 2022 Our work on Dependency Dialogue Acts (DDA) will be presented at IWSDS 2023!

selected publications

  1. Unsupervised End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue with LLMs: The Power of the Noisy Channel
    Brendan King, and Jeffrey Flanigan
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2024
  2. Diverse Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Dialogue State Tracking
    Brendan King, and Jeffrey Flanigan
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, Jul 2023
  3. Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study
    Jon Cai, Brendan King, Margaret Perkoff, and 9 more authors
    In The 13th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology, IWSDS 2023, Los Angeles, United States, Feb 2023
  4. ProbAnnoWeb and ProbAnnoPy: probabilistic annotation and gap-filling of metabolic reconstructions
    Brendan King, Terry Farrah, Matthew A. Richards, and 3 more authors
    Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), May 2018