WestlakeNLP
自然语言处理实验室

WestlakeNLP focuses on fundamental and applied research in Natural Language Processing. The goal is to explore and achieve general artificial intelligence through innovations in language model architectures and training mechanisms, thereby advancing research in both natural and human sciences.

The laboratory was established in September 2018 and is led by Professor Yue Zhang, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. He currently serves as the Associate Dean of the School of Engineering at Westlake University. Professor Zhang is the author of “Natural Language Processing” published by Cambridge University Press and has chaired program committees for several top-tier NLP conferences, including EMNLP 2022. He is also on the editorial boards of several international journals. He has received multiple best paper awards and nominations at international NLP conferences, such as ACL 2023 and COLING 2018. The lab currently comprises four postdoctoral researchers, seven research assistants, ten doctoral students, and several visiting students.

The laboratory undertakes key projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation, major research and development plans, national key laboratory projects, and various industry collaborations. Recently, it has focused on fundamental NLP tasks such as Machine Translation and Information Extraction, general intelligence research exemplified by Large Language Model Reasoning and Out-of-distribution Generalization, and research directions like AI scientists driven by large models. The lab was awarded the third prize in natural science by the Computer Society in 2024.

WestlakeNLP has graduated 12 doctoral students. Many have received honors such as the Westlake University President and Dean’s Medals, national scholarships, and provincial outstanding graduate awards. Graduates have gone on to become assistant professors at institutions like Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen University, and Hainan University, and postdoctoral researchers at universities such as Cambridge University, Tsinghua University, and Pujiang Laboratory, as well as research scientists at Tencent AI Lab. The lab’s predecessor, SUTD NLP Lab, graduated six doctoral students who have taken positions such as assistant professor at Harvard University and senior researcher at ByteDance.

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