Research Interests

Building a bridge between languages and other modalities.

Publications [Google Scholar]

(#: students I mentored at Microsoft Research)

Conference and Preprint
Workshop
Journal

Experience

  • Dec. 2018 - Now, Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia. Principal Researcher.

  • Sept. 2015 - July 2019, Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), University of Edinburgh. Supervisor: Mirella Lapata.

  • June 2017 - Aug. 2017, Natural Language Processing Group, Microsoft Research Redmond. Mentor: Chris Quirk.

  • May 2012 - Sept. 2015, Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia. Mentor: Furu Wei.

  • Oct. 2010 - Sept. 2015, State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University. Supervisor: Ke Xu.

Honors and Awards

  • CVPR-24 Best Student Paper Award, 2024

  • AAAI-21 Best Paper Runner Up, 2021

  • 2019 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award (Runner Up), 2020

  • ACL-18 Best Paper Honourable Mention, 2018

  • Adeptmind Scholar Fellowship, 2018

  • Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship, 2015

  • Graduate Student Scholarship 1st, 2012

  • AirBus Scholarship, 2011

  • National Scholarship, 2010/2014

  • Qian-Shen Scholarship 1st, 2009

Professional Activities

  • Area Chair: EMNLP 2019 (Sentence-level Semantics), EMNLP 2020 (Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas), NAACL 2021 (Machine Learning for NLP: Language Modeling and Sequence to Sequence Models), ACL 2021 (Question Answering), EMNLP 2022 (Machine Learning for NLP; NLP Applications; Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Textual Inference and Other areas), ACL 2023 (Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas), NeurIPS 2023, COLM 2024, NeurIPS 2024, COLING 2025 (Natural Language Generation, Summarization, and Simplification), ICLR 2025

  • Senior Area Chair: ACL 2025 (Machine Learning for NLP), IJCNLP-AACL 2023 (Multimodality: Speech, Vision, Robotics, and Beyond)

  • Action Editor: ACL Rolling Review (NAACL 2022 Outstanding Action Editor), Transactions on Machine Learning Research

  • Senior Program Committee: IJCAI 2021

  • Session Chair: EMNLP 2019 (Sentence-level Semantics), AACL 2020 (Machine Learning for NLP)

  • Program Committee / Reviewer: ACL (ACL-18 Outstanding Reviewer), EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, COLING, CL, TACL (Standing Reviewer: 2020-2023), ACL Rolling Review, TPAMI, CVPR, ECCV, Nature Machine Intelligence, TKDE, etc.