Wenqiang Lei

I am Wenqiang Lei (雷文强), a Professor in Sichuan University. Preciously, I was a Post-doc Researcher in School of Computing, National University of Singapore, working with Prof. Tat Seng Chua. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from NUS (working with Prof. Min-Yen Kan).

I am primarily interested in natural language processing and information retrieval. Specifically, my research is driven by the theme of Human-In-The-Loop (HITL), which basically means an intelligent agent cooperating together to finish a certain task. Pursuing along this long-term goal, I have been conducting research on various aspects:

Dialogue and QA system

--Dialogue and QA systems are two classic topics for human—computer interaction.

User feedback modeling

--User is the center of HITL systems. It is therefore a core research question to study how users’ feedback to or evaluation of a system performance and automatically simulate them to facilitate intelligent agent developing.

Understanding user input signals

--To better involve a user into a system, a system needs to better understand users based on their input signals. I am interested in understanding the signals carried by both natural languages (basically on discourse and pragmatic level) and beyond languages (mostly focusing on music and emotion).

HITL applications

--I believe the rationale of HITL will bring revolutions to many traditional NLP and IR applications as it provides a channel to involve human intelligence. Now, I am trying to introduce conversational mechanism to traditional recommendation system, building a conversational recommendation system.


Address: #05-21, Computing 1, Computing Drive, Singapore 117417

Email: wenqianglei at gmail dot com

Recent Activities


Co-oragnizing a special issue about conversational information seeking on IEEE Trans. on Big Data


Giving tutorials about conversational recommendation on SIGIR 2020 and CCIR 2020, CCL 2020.


Serving as Program Co-chairs of he 2020 Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP 2020)


Visiting CoAI Lab, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Dec. 2019 ~ Feb. 2019

-Collaborating with AP Minlie Huang on dialogue projects