News

• 2 long papers and 1 short paper are accepted by EMNLP 2019! These work includes low-response dialogue generation with both paired and unpaired data, and sampling methods for learning a matching models.
• I am going to present the tutorial ``Deep Chit-Chat: Deep Learning for ChatBots" at SIGIR 2019 with Professor Rui Yan.
• 3 long papers are accepted by ACL 2019! These work includes deep matching for retrieval-based dialogue systems, matching learning for retrival-based dialogue systems, and controllable&explainable response generation.

About Me

I am a principal applied scientist lead in Microsoft Xiaoice Team since January, 2018. Before that, I was a lead researcher in Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). I joined MSRA in 2012 and had been a member of Natural Language Computing (NLC) group until December 2017. Before I became an employee in MSRA, I was a joint student of MSRA and Peking University. My advisor is Professor Hang Li.

I obtained a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Peking University in 2007 and earned my Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Peking University in 2012.

My research interests include machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

My current research focus is building conversational engines for chatbots with machine learning and NLP techniques. I have been working on single-turn conversation, multi-turn conversation, and topical deep chat since 2014. I am a key technology contributor to core chat engines of Microsoft XiaoIce (微软小冰) v2, v3, v4, v5 and v6 and Microsoft Rinna (りんな). My significant achievements include the launching of generation based chat engines in XiaoIce and Rinna and the recent Empathy Model in Rinna. Particularly, my work serves Microsoft's chatbot in Indonesia with full dialogue generation technologies. The chatbot now has more than 1.5 million users on LINE Indonesia.