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 broadly in natural language processing and machine learning, such as text generation, machine translation, transfer learning, reward learning, etc. Recently, I am working on the general topic of humane AI, with the goal of developing AI technology that is not only technically advanced but also benefits everyone fairly and contributes positively to society.

• Humane AI
  Low-resource (language) NLP; Fairness in NLP
• Machine Learning
  Transfer Learning; Reward Learning; Efficient Learning
• Language Generation
  Style Transfer; Figurative Language; Evaluation

Education

• 03/2020 - 12/2023, 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- . Postdoc. University of Groningen
• Nov 2023-Dec 2023. Research Assistant. University of Groningen
• Sep 2019-Feb 2020. PhD student. Delft University of Technology (Transferred to Groningen in Mar 2020)
• Sep 2017-Dec 2017. Research intern. JD.com

Supervision

• 09/2022 - ongoing. 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.

Teaching

• 2024 Spring. Web Programming (LIX018P05).

Service

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

Talks and Presentations

• 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. The Chinese Government Scholarship (4-year)
• 2018-2019. Outstanding Academic Scholarship (5%)
• 2018-2019. Outstanding Graduate Student Award(15%)
• 2016-2019. The First-Class Scholarship (three times)