Reported by: JI Xuan
Translated by: JIAYingxue
Edited by: Daniel Penistone
At the 2015 annual conference of The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), held in Beijing, Chinese Information Processing Society of China President and HIT School of Computer Science and Technology Professor Li Sheng won the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award with decades of achievements and contributions in research on machine translation direction, becoming the first person to win it in China and the second one in Asia.
Professor Li Sheng has presided over more than 10 research projects including projects of the original Aerospace Corporation, "863" program, projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and has won seven ministerial progress prizes in scientific and collective technology. He began to study C-E machine translation since 1985, and is one of the first scholars in the direction of the research. In 1989, the C-E machine translation system CEMT-I, developed by Li’s team, became the first to pass the technical appraisal in China and won the ministerial progress prize in scientific and collective technology. Professor Li has studied in the field of machine translation for many years, and achieved remarkable achievements in machine translation technology and natural language processing (NLP), which includes the related syntax and semantic analysis. He has made pioneering contribution to the development of machine translation in China. As one of the first scholars studying NLP in China since China’s reform and opening up, Professor Li has not only achieved great research success, but has also trained a group of outstanding young experts in the field of computer science, including the first Chinese President of ACL and the Vice President of Baidu, Dr. Wang Haifeng, the Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Zhou Ming, and the Distinguished Professor of Soochow University, Dr. Zhang Ming. He contributes to the development of China's computer technology generation to generation.
Professor Li expressed firm belief in the prospects for the development of machine translation in his winning speech. He said: “I am like Yu Gong of Yu Gong Yi Shan in the cause of machine translation or even the field of NLP. I will spare no effort in my life to overcome the problems and obstacles. Even on the days I cannot continue to overcome these challenges, I still have my students. With generation after generation of our people's efforts, we believe that the goal of machine translation, and even the dream of truly understanding the language of computers will eventually be realized.”
It is known that the ACL has 53 years of history, with members around the world, representing the world's highest level of computational linguistics. ACL’s annual conference is the leading international conference on natural language processing. Papers published annually reflect the latest trends in research and academic progress in the field of NLP, drawing widespread attention of academia and industry. ACL annually awards "Lifetime Achievement Award" to outstanding scientists in NLP.
President of ACL and Professor of Stanford University Chris Manning presenting the award to Professor Li
