Ning Shi (石宁)
Ph.D. Candidate, Computing Science
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Updated on Aug. 25, 2025
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About Me
About Me
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, supervised by Prof. Grzegorz Kondrak and affiliated with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Prior to my Ph.D., I worked as a Senior Algorithm Engineer at Alibaba Group. I hold master's degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and New York University. I am open to research opportunities and collaboration. Please feel free to get in touch.
News
News
08/20/2025 One paper was accepted by EMNLP 2025.
07/25/2025 Passed my Ph.D. candidacy examination. Many thanks to my wonderful committee!
07/10/2025 Glad to share my research at the Undergraduate CS Research Seminar.
06/17/2025 Enjoyed presenting my research at the Tea Time Talk hosted by the RLAI.
04/24/2025 Honored to receive the 2025 Graduate Student Teaching Award.
02/29/2025 Glad to receive the 2025 Upper Bound Talent Bursary. See you there!
02/16/2025 Our team achieved top rankings in the COMET track of SemEval 2025 Task 2!
12/06/2024 Grateful to receive the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship again.
11/29/2024 One paper was accepted by COLING 2025.
09/20/2024 Excited to share recent findings at the Amii AI Seminar.
09/06/2024 Glad to receive the Best Poster Award at Reverse EXPO.
09/03/2024 Honored to receive the Computing Science Graduate Award for Parents.
05/15/2024 One paper was accepted by ACL 2024.
04/22/2024 Three papers were accepted by *SEM 2024.
04/15/2024 Joined AI for Good Summer Lab program as a TA.
03/19/2024 Our team secured top-three positions in 16 language/track settings at SemEval 2024 Task 1!
02/29/2024 Glad to receive the 2024 Upper Bound Talent Bursary.
Flashback
Flashback
11/29/2023 Honored to receive the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship.
10/07/2023 One paper was accepted by EMNLP 2023.
07/08/2023 Attended my first in-person conference, ACL@2023. Great to meet everyone there!
05/22/2023 Our survey paper was finally out. Check it out here!
05/01/2023 One paper was accepted by Findings of ACL 2023.
01/21/2023 One paper was accepted by EACL 2023.
12/23/2022 Glad to share recent findings at the Amii AI Seminar.
10/11/2022 One paper was accepted by the Fifth BlackboxNLP in EMNLP 2022.
10/06/2022 Two papers were accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2022.
05/07/2022 Graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
08/26/2021 One paper was accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2021.
06/02/2021 One paper was accepted by Interspeech 2021.
05/12/2021 Graduated from Syracuse University.
03/18/2021 My son Yili (Elio) Shi (石熠礼) came into the world.
11/19/2020 Joined Alibaba Group as a senior algorithm engineer.
09/15/2020 One paper was accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2020.
09/01/2019 Proudly launched the Shining Lab, dedicated to researching cutting-edge innovations in AI.
07/28/2018 Joined Learnable as a machine learning engineer.
05/16/2018 Graduated from New York University.
Publications
Publications
Zekun Wang, King Zhu, Chunpu Xu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiaheng Liu, Yibo Zhang, Jiashuo Wang, Ning Shi, Siyu Li, Yizhi Li, Haoran Que, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ge Zhang, Ke Xu, Jie Fu, Wenhao Huang. 2024. MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokens. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, David Basil, Bradley Hauer, Noshin Nawal, Jai Riley, Daniela Teodorescu, John Zhang, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2025. UAlberta at SemEval-2025 Task 2: Prompting and Ensembling for Entity-Aware Translation. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 1709–1717, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
🏆 1st Place on Track COMET Score
Jai Riley, Bradley M. Hauer, Nafisa Sadaf Hriti, Guoqing Luo, Amir Reza Mirzaei, Ali Rafiei, Hadi Sheikhi, Mahvash Siavashpour, Mohammad Tavakoli, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2025. Semi-Automated Construction of Sense-Annotated Datasets for Practically Any Language. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6270–6284, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Senyu Li, Bradley Hauer, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Translation-based Lexicalization Generation and Lexical Gap Detection: Application to Kinship Terms. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6891–6900, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Lexical Substitution as Causal Language Modeling. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024), pages 120–132, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, Jai Riley, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Paraphrase Identification via Textual Inference. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024), pages 133–141, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Logan Woudstra, Moyo Dawodu, Frances Igwe, Senyu Li, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. Identifying Emotional and Polar Concepts via Synset Translation. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024), pages 142–152, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, Senyu Li, Guoqing Luo, Amirreza Mirzaei, Ali Rafiei, Jai Riley, Hadi Sheikhi, Mahvash Siavashpour, Mohammad Tavakoli, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2024. UAlberta at SemEval-2024 Task 1: A Potpourri of Methods for Quantifying Multilingual Semantic Textual Relatedness and Similarity. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024), pages 1798–1805, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
🏆 1st Place on Track A English among all submitted systems
Xiang Zhang, Senyu Li, Bradley Hauer, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. Don’t Trust ChatGPT when your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7915–7927, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
[arXiv] [Paper] [Pdf] [Code] [Poster] [Slides] [Video] (Oral)
Zekun Wang, Ge Zhang, Kexin Yang, Ning Shi, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shaochun Hao, Guangzheng Xiong, Yizhi Li, Mong Yuan Sim, Xiuying Chen, Qingqing Zhu, Zhenzhu Yang, Adam Nik, Qi Liu, Chenghua Lin, Shi Wang, Ruibo Liu, Wenhu Chen, Ke Xu, Dayiheng Liu, Yike Guo, Jie Fu. 2023. Interactive Natural Language Processing. Springer Nature.
Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, and Heng Ji. 2023. From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9607–9632, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Michael Ogezi, Bradley Hauer, Talgat Omarov, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. UAlberta at SemEval-2023 Task 1: Context Augmentation and Translation for Multilingual Visual Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pages 2043–2051, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Xiang Zhang, Ning Shi, Bradley Hauer, and Grzegorz Kondrak. 2023. Bridging the Gap Between BabelNet and HowNet: Unsupervised Sense Alignment and Sememe Prediction. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2789–2798, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, Boxin Wang, Wei Wang, Xiangyu Liu, and Zhouhan Lin. 2022. Revisit Systematic Generalization via Meaningful Learning. In Proceedings of the Fifth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 62–79, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, Bin Tang, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Yewen Pu, Jie Fu, and Zhouhan Lin. 2022. Text Editing as Imitation Game. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 1583–1594, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Presented at the Second Version of Generation, Evaluation & Metrics (GEM) Workshop.
Zihan Zhang, Jinfeng Li, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Xiangyu Liu, Rong Zhang, Hui Xue, Donghong Sun, and Chao Zhang. 2022. RoChBert: Towards Robust BERT Fine-tuning for Chinese. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 3502–3516, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Wei Wang, Boxin Wang, Ning Shi, Jinfeng Li, Bingyu Zhu, Xiangyu Liu, and Rong Zhang. 2021. Counterfactual Adversarial Learning with Representation Interpolation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4809–4820, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ning Shi, Ziheng Zeng, Haotian Zhang, and Yichen Gong. 2020. Recurrent Inference in Text Editing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1758–1769, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Presented at the Fourth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP (SPNLP).
Keran Zhao, Yuheng Hu, Yingda Lu, and Ning Shi. 2019. The Impact of Emotion on Social Media Content Consumption: Evidence from Video Analysis on Live Streaming Platforms. In INFORMS Annual Meeting 2019, Seattle, WA.
Ning Shi. 2018. The Relationship of Academic Capital and Altmetrics: Effects of Elsevier Metrics on Mendeley Reader Count. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Science in Management and Systems at New York University.
Education
Education
University of Alberta
Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science
Georgia Institute of Technology
Master of Science in Computer Science
Syracuse University
Master of Science in Applied Data Science
New York University
Master of Science in Management and Systems
Donghua University
Bachelor of Management in Electronic Commerce
Edmonton, Canada
Sep. 2022 - (May 2026)
Atlanta, USA
Sep. 2019 - May 2022
Syracuse, USA
Sep. 2018 - May 2021
New York, USA
Sep. 2016 - May 2018
Shanghai, China
Sep. 2010 - Jun. 2014
Experience
Experience
Association for Computational Linguistics
ARR Support Team Member
University of Alberta
Graduate Teaching Assistant Head
CMPUT 331 - Computational Cryptography
Graduate Teaching Assistant
CMPUT 174 - Introduction to the Foundations of Computation I
CMPUT 261 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
CMPUT 331 - Computational Cryptography
CMPUT 399 - Topics in Computing Science
Research Topic - Emotion Identification at the Word Sense Level
Undergrad - Logan Woudstra
CMPUT 603 - Teaching and Research Methods
CMPUT 650 - Topics in Artificial Intelligence: Computational Semantics
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)
Graduate Research Assistant
Supervisor - Prof. Grzegorz Kondrak
Research Topics - Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning
CIFAR-OSMO AI4Good Lab
Graduate Teaching Assistant
AI For Good Summer Lab Program
[Web]
Computing Research Association
Research Mentor
Undergraduate Research to PhD Program (UR2PhD)
Research Topic - Understanding Multilingual Emotional Expressions
Undergrad - Frances Igwe, Moyo Dawodu
Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)
Research Intern - Advised by Dr. Jie Fu
Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Governance Laboratory (AAIG), Alibaba Group
Turing Security Lab, Alibaba Group
Senior Algorithm Engineer (Algorithm Engineer II)
Shining Lab
Founder - Advised by Prof. Zhouhan Lin
Learnable, Inc.
Machine Learning Engineer
Machine Learning Engineer Intern
Pythagoras Investment Management LLC
Algorithm Engineer Intern
Edmonton, Canada (Remote)
Oct. 2023 - Now
Edmonton, Canada
Jan. 2025 - Apr 2025
Sep. 2022 - Now
Edmonton, Canada
Sep. 2022 - Now
Edmonton, Canada
Apr. 2024 - Jun. 2024
Edmonton, Canada (Hybrid)
Sep. 2023 - Dec. 2023
Beijing, China
Aug. 2022 - Aug. 2023
Hangzhou, China
Nov. 2020 - Jul. 2022
Shanghai, China
Sep. 2019 - Now
Boston, United States
Sep. 2018 - Sep. 2020
Aug. 2018 - Sep. 2018
New York City, United States
Dec. 2017 - May 2018
Talks
Talks
On the Equivalence of Tasks in Sentential Semantics
Accurate Word Probability Estimation in Causal LLMs
Computational Semantics via Lexical Concepts
Inspiring Natural Language Processing with Human Cognition
Text Editing as Imitation Game
Recurrent Inference in Text Editing
Beyond The Code, University of Alberta
Jul. 10th, 2025
Tea Time Talks, RLAI Lab, University of Alberta
Jun. 17th, 2025
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) AI Seminar
Sep. 20th, 2024
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) AI Seminar
Dec. 23rd, 2022
the Second GEM in EMNLP 2022
Dec. 7th, 2022
the Fourth SPNLP in EMNLP 2020
Nov. 20th, 2020
Services
Services
Reviewer
Journal
Conference
Workshop
Secondary Reviewer
Journal
Conference
Workshop
Volunteer
Mentor
Electronic Commerce Research, Information Processing and Management
AAAI 2025, ACL 2023-2025, AISTATS 2025-2026, ARR 2021-2025, COLM 2024-2025
EMNLP 2022-2025, ICLR 2024-2026, ICML 2022-2025, NeurIPS 2022-2025, RLC 2024-2025
ENLSP 2023-2025, SemEval 2023-2025, WiNLP 2025
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Canadian AI 2023-2025, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, LREC-COLING 2024, COLING 2025
CAWL 2023
ACL 2023, ARR Support Team
WiNLP 2025
Awards
Awards
Graduate Student Teaching Award
Upper Bound Talent Bursary
Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship
Reverse EXPO Best Poster Award
Computing Science Graduate Award for Parents
Upper Bound Talent Bursary
Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship
GSA Academic Travel Grant
Full Doctoral Scholarship
Graduate Research Assistantship Fellowship
University of Alberta
Apr. 2025
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)
Jan. 2025
Alberta, Canada
Sep. 2024 - Mar. 2025
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Sep. 2024
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Sep. 2024 - Aug. 2025
Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)
Feb. 2024
Alberta, Canada
Sep. 2023 - Mar. 2024
Graduate Students' Association (GSA), University of Alberta
Jul. 2023
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Sep. 2022 - May 2026
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Sep. 2022 - May 2026
Alumni
Alumni
Graduate Students
Noshin Nawal (Master, Amii, University of Alberta, 2025)
Jai Riley (Master, Amii, University of Alberta, 2025)
Hadi Sheikhi (Master, Amii, University of Alberta, 2024)
Senyu Li (PhD, Mila, McGill University, 2024)
Mike Ogezi (PhD, Vector Institute, University of Waterloo, 2024)
Undergraduate Students
John Zhang (Co-op, University of Waterloo, 2025)
Moyo Dawodu (UR2PhD, Amii, University of Alberta, 2024)
Frances Igwe (UR2PhD, Amii, University of Alberta, 2024)
Logan Woudstra (Undergraduate Researcher, Amii, University of Alberta, 2024)
Xiang Zhang (Master, The University of British Columbia, 2023)
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