Pozdrav! Ciao! Salut! Hola! Allinllachu! Welkom! Welcome! Bienvenue! Willkommen! Fàilte! Dobro došli! 

About me 

From October 2022 I hold a position of Principal Research Associate (≈ Reader / Associate Prof) in the Language Technology Lab at the University of Cambridge (where I've been since October 2015) . From November 2022, my research is co-funded by a personal Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

I received the 2021 Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award for contributions to natural language processing and information retrieval. I gave a keynote talk at ECIR 2022, and the slides are available here.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven (awarded summa cum laude with congratulations of the board of examiners).

I am very interested in natural language processing, human language understanding, machine learning theory and applications, and information retrieval, and all that in monolingual, multilingual, and multi-modal (vision-text-speech) settings. This includes (but is not limited to): cross-lingual, multilingual and multi-modal representation learning, modularity and composability of ML models, sample-efficient, parameter-efficient and few-shot ML, transfer learning for enabling responsible cross-lingual NLP applications for low-resource languages and dialects, multi-modal semantics, conversational AI and multilingual dialogue modeling , Integration of external knowledge into ML models, cross-lingual, multilingual and multi-modal information search, few-shot and unsupervised learning for NLP, debiasing and safety for ML and NLP, (multilingual) speech recognition and text-to-speech generation, multilingual resource creation for NLP models, integration of language technology, etc.

Feel free to contact me if your research lies within these or related areas!

In the meantime, also feel free to take a look at my publications.

For reasons beyond my own comprehension, I have created a Twitter account: @licwu

(From January 2018 until November 2024, I was also a Senior Scientist at PolyAI, an extremely talented company working on cutting-edge Conversational AI technology, but that's another story and this website is mostly my academic dwelling...)