Danqi Chen and Huacheng Yu have been the epitome of intelligence and intimate relationship in the community of coding competition for long. They met each other in middle school and loved each other ever since, while both achieved great academic performance.

I was walking through papers on NLP and came across the Ph.D. thesis of Danqi. This is one of the most beautiful relationships that I’ve got the privilege to know.

Lastly, I would like to thank Huacheng for his love and support (we got married 4 months before this dissertation was submitted). I was fifteen when I first met Huacheng and we have been experiencing almost everything together since then: from high-school programming competitions, to our wonderful college time at Tsinghua University and we both made it to the Stanford CS PhD program in 2012. For over ten years in the past, he is not only my partner, my classmate, my best friend, but also the person I admire most, for his modesty, intelligence, concentration and hard work. Without him, I would not have come to Stanford. Without him, I would also not have taken the job at Princeton. I thank him for everything he has done for me.

Chen, D. (2018). Neural reading comprehension and beyond. Stanford University: ix.