University of Groningen
Office: Harmonie Complex, Room 1311.417, 9712 EK Groningen, The Netherlands
Email: huiyuanlai dot l AT gmail.com

Hi! I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, working with prof. dr. M. (Malvina) Nissim. Before that I worked on a Machine Translation project as a Research Assistant, collaborating with dr. Antonio Toral Ruiz and dr. Rik van Noord.

Previously, I was a PhD student at the Computational Linguistics department, University of Groningen, supervised by prof. dr. M. (Malvina) Nissim and dr. A. (Antonio) Toral Ruiz. My PhD project mainly focuses on natural language understanding and generation, especially text style transfer and creative text generation. I was born in Hainan ( 海南岛), China. I received my master's degree from China Academy of Engineering Physics in 2019 and my bachelor's degree from Central South University in 2015.

Research

My research interests lie in the broad field of natural language processing and machine learning. Currently, I am particularly interested in generative AI and reasoning generalization in large language models.

• Generative AI
  Reasoning; Multilingual/Low-resource NLP
• Machine Learning
  Transfer Learning; Reward Learning; Efficient Learning
• Language Generation
  Style Transfer; Figurative Language; Evaluation

Education

• 03/2020 - 02/2024, University of Groningen. Groningen, the Netherlands
• 09/2016 - 06/2019, China Academy of Engineering Physics. Beijing, China
• 09/2011 - 06/2015, Central South University. Changsha, China

Experience

• Dec 2023-Present. Postdoc Fellow. University of Groningen
• Nov 2023-Dec 2023. Research Assistant. University of Groningen
• Sep 2019-Feb 2020. PhD student. Delft University of Technology (Transferred to RUG)
• Sep 2017-Dec 2017. Research intern. JD.com

Academic Service

• Journal Reviewer
  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)
  IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
  
• Conference Programme Committee/Reviewer
  HumEval 2023, 2024
  ACL 2023, 2024
  EMNLP 2020, 2023, 2024
  COLING 2022, 2024
  NAACL 2024
  NeurIPS 2024
  
• ACL Rolling Reviewer (2021-Present)

Supervision and Teaching

• 09/2022 - 05/2024. Co-supervisor. Msc in computer science
  Yiru Li: Investigating Reproducibility of Human Evaluations in NLP.
• 01/2022 - 07/2023. Co-supervisor. Marieke Weultjes. Msc in computer science
  
Marieke Weultjes: Formality style transfer in Dutch.
• 06/2021 - 11/2021. Co-supervisor. Bsc in computer science
  
Jiali Mao: Evaluation for automatic text style transfer.
• 2024 Spring. Web Programming (LIX018P05).

Talks and Presentations

• 05/2024. Guest lecture at the Language Technology Project.
• 03/2024. Invited talk at Correct Reasoning in Data-driven Artificial Intelligence workshop
• 07/2023. Paper presentation at ACL 2023
• 06/2023. Talk at NLG in the Lowlands workshop
• 10/2022. Paper presentation at COLING 2022
• 05/2022. Invited talk at Dublin NLP Seminar
• 05/2022. Paper presentation at ACL 2022 and HumEval Workshop
• 11/2021. Paper presentation at EMNLP 2021
• 08/2021. Paper presentation at ACL 2021
• 05/2020. Talk at Groningen NLP group

Awards and Scholarships

• 2019-2023. China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship
• 2018-2019. Outstanding Academic Scholarship (5%)
• 2018-2019. Outstanding Graduate Student Award(15%)
• 2016-2019. The First-Class Scholarship (three times)