Li Sheng (born 1943) is a professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China.^[1] Born and raised in Heilongjiang province, he graduated in 1965 from the computer specialty of HIT, which is one of the earliest computer specialties in Chinese universities. He then began working as a staff member in the computer specialty of HIT, which was granted status as a department in 1985. Also starting in 1985, he was appointed to a series of administrative positions at HIT, such as Dean of the Computer Department (1987–1988), Director of the R&D Division (1988–1990), Chief R&D Officer, and several other key leadership roles.^[2] He was also a final review committee member for the computer area in NSF China.

He began his research on Chinese-English machine translation in 1985, making him one of the earliest Chinese scholars in this field. After that, he pursued vast topics in natural language processing, including machine translation, information retrieval, question answering, and applied artificial intelligence. After resigning from all his administrative positions in 2004, Li devoted himself to serving as the director of the MOE-Microsoft Join Key Lab of NLP & Speech (HIT), making it a leading NLP research group with more than 100 staff and students working on various aspects of NLP. The lab has been granted dozens of technology awards by ministries of the central government and local provincial governments of China. Its research progress is reported annually at top-tier conferences including ACL, IJCAI, and SIGIR.^[3,4,5]

As one of the pioneers in NLP research in China, he contributes to Chinese NLP not only through technology innovations but also in talent education. His research group has graduated more than 60 Ph.D. and almost 200 M.E. students majoring in NLP. Most of them now work as chief researchers in various NLP groups at universities and companies in China, including world-known NLP scholars such as Wang Haifeng of Baidu, Zhou Ming of Microsoft Research, Zhang Min (张民) of Soochow University (China), and Zhao Tiejun (赵铁军) and Liu Ting (刘挺) of HIT.^[6,7] Owing to his contributions to Chinese language processing, Li was elected President of the Chinese Information Processing Society of China (CIPSC) in 2011.^[8] He scaled this top-level academic organization in China up to more than 3,000 registered members and promoted NLP into several national projects for research and industry development. In addition, the CIPSC is enhancing its cooperation with international NLP organizations, including ACL.

The laboratory originated from the Machine Translation Research Group of the Computer Science Department at the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), which was started by Li in 1985. It is one of the earliest institutions engaged in machine translation research in China, distinguished by its investigations into Chinese-English machine translation. It currently operates under the Research Center on Language Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, HIT. Details regarding staff and publications can be found at https://mitlab.hit.edu.cn.

In June 2000, the Joint HIT-Microsoft Machine Translation Lab was founded by the MI&T Lab and Microsoft Research (China). It was the third joint lab established by Microsoft Research (China) with Chinese universities, and the only one focusing on machine translation. Based on this joint lab, cooperation between HIT and Microsoft gradually extended into the areas of machine translation, information retrieval, speech recognition and processing, and natural language understanding. In October 2004, the joint key lab was designated as one of the 10 joint key labs supported by Microsoft Research of Asia and the Ministry of Education in China.^[9] In July 2006, the Shenzhen extension of the lab was launched.

More than 200 staff and students have undertaken research projects at the lab, including projects sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National 863 program of China. Through the lab, a Microsoft Research of Asia-HIT joint PhD program was implemented in 2012. Since 2005, the lab has also organized a summer camp at the Harbin Institute of Technology, with approximately 150 faculty members and students from universities in China participating. This summer workshop was held annually until 2014, when it was formally organized as the summer school series by the Chinese Information Processing Society, China.^[10]

In May 1989, CEMT-I passed the formal project appraisal in Harbin, China. Capable of translating technical paper titles from Chinese to English, it is not only the first MT system completed by Li and his group, but also the first Chinese-English translation system that passed the technical appraisal by the Chinese government according to public reports. It was then awarded the Second Prize of Ministry Level Technology Innovation by the former National Aerospace Industry Corporation in 1990.

Owing to the technical achievements by Li's group in Chinese-English machine translation, the former National Aerospace Industry Corporation of China sponsored the commercial system development of "Daya Translation Station (MT)" in 1993. Designed as a comprehensive English composition aid for Chinese users, this system was finished and put into the market in 1995. In 1997, the system was awarded the Second Prize of Ministry Level Technology Innovation by the former National Aerospace Industry Corporation.

From 1994, research in Li's lab was supported by the National 863 Hi-tech Research and Development Program. During this period, the BT863 system was explored to employ a single engine for both Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation. In the formal technical evaluation of the National 863 program, the system was proven to have the best performance among Chinese-English machine translation systems, earning the Third Prize of Ministry Level Technology Innovation from the former National Aerospace Industry Corporation in 1997.

This key project, granted by NSF China with joint sponsorship from MSRA, began in 2008. In contrast to his previous NSF grants for various NLP issues, Li explored key technologies in personalized IR in his final PI project alongside researchers from Tsinghua University and the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Science. Following impressive publications in top-tier journals and conferences (including breakthrough publications in SIGIR by his own group), the project was approved as "A-level" achievements by the NSF China office in 2012.