Postdoc Researcher
Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG)
University of Groningen

Office: Harmonie Complex, Room 1311.417, 9712 EK Groningen
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. I received my PhD from 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, such as text style transfer. Prior to that, I received my master degree from China Academy of Engineering Physics in 2019 and my bachelor degree from Central South University in 2015. I was born in Hainan ( 海南岛 ), a lovely tropical island in the southernmost province of China.

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 in large language models.

• Generative AI
  LLM Reasoning; Multilingual/Low-resource NLP
• Machine Learning
  Transfer Learning; Reward Learning; Efficient Learning
• Language Generation
  Controlled Text Generation; Machine Translation; Evaluation

Work and Education

• Nov 2023 - Present. Postdoc. University of Groningen, the Netherlands
• Mar 2020 - Feb 2024. University of Groningen. Groningen, the Netherlands
• Sep 2016 - Jun 2019. China Academy of Engineering Physics. Beijing, China
• Sep 2011 - Jun 2015. Central South University. Changsha, China
• 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 Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)
  IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
  Northern European Journal of Language Technology (NEJLT)
  
• Conference Reviewer/Area Chair
  EACL 2026; IJCAI 2025; INLG 2025; NAACL 2024; NeurIPS 2024; ACL 2023, 2024, 2025
  COLING 2022, 2024; EMNLP 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025; HumEval 2023, 2024
  ACL Rolling Reviewer
  

Teaching and Supervision

• 2025, 2026 Spring. Machine Translation. University of Groningen
• 2024, 2025 Fall. Shared Task Information Science. University of Groningen
• 2024, 2025 Fall. Text Manipulation. University of Groningen
• 2024 Spring. Web Programming. University of Groningen
• Dec 2024 - Jul 2025. Co-superviosr. Msc in computer science
  Silvana Abdi: Optimizing Dutch Reasoning in Large Language Models
• Oct 2022 - May 2024. Co-supervisor. Msc in computer science
  Yiru Li: Investigating Reproducibility of Human Evaluations in NLP
• Jan 2022 - Jul 2023. Co-supervisor. Msc in computer science
  
Marieke Weultjes: Formality style transfer in Dutch.
• Jun 2021 - Nov 2021. Co-supervisor. Bsc in computer science
  
Jiali Mao: Evaluation for automatic text style transfer

Talks and Presentations

• Jul 2025. Paper presentation at ACL 2025
• Aug 2024. Paper presentation at ACL 2024
• May 2024. Guest lecture at the Language Technology Project.
• Mar 2024. Invited talk at Correct Reasoning in Data-driven Artificial Intelligence workshop
• Jul 2023. Paper presentation at ACL 2023
• Jun 2023. Talk at NLG in the Lowlands workshop
• Oct 2022. Paper presentation at COLING 2022
• May 2022. Invited talk at Dublin NLP Seminar
• May 2022. Paper presentation at ACL 2022 and HumEval Workshop
• Nov 2021. Paper presentation at EMNLP 2021
• Aug 2021. Paper presentation at ACL 2021
• May 2020. Talk at Groningen NLP group

Awards and Scholarships

• 2023-2026. Sector plan in the Humanities “Humane AI” funded by the Dutch Ministry
• 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)