Liang Ding (丁亮)

NLP Researcher

JD Explore Academy
JD.com, Inc.
Beijing, China

E-mail: liangding.liam@gmail.com
Twitter: @liangdingNLP
GitHub: @alphadl


Biography

I am currently a research scientist and lead the NLP research group [photo of JDExplore d-team] at JD Explore Academy. I am also a member of the Doctoral Management Trainee (DMT) program (a top-tier talent program in JD.com, Inc.). I received Ph.D. from The University of Sydney, supervised by Prof. Dacheng Tao (IEEE/ACM Fellow). I was a research intern at Tencent AI Lab, advised by Dr. Zhaopeng Tu and Dr. Longyue Wang. I also worked at Cheetah Mobile as the main developer of the "realtime voice translator" [Demo]. I have published over 40 papers in NLP/ML venues, including ACL, EMNLP, COLING, NAACL, ICLR, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, SIGIR, CVPR, IEEE TKDE, TNNLS, and TMM, and some of them were applied to industrial products. I served as the Area Chair for ACL 2022 and Session Chair for AAAI 2023 and SDM 2021. I won many AI challenges, including SuperGLUE benchmark, GLUE benchmark, WMT 2022, IWSLT 2021 and WMT 2019.

My research mainly focuses on deep learning for NLP, including large language model pretraining, language understanding, generation, and translation. More recently, I and my group have been focusing on foundation models of general NLP. We start with data, models, objectives, optimization, and better adaptation to various downstream tasks to investigate how to efficiently, sufficiently and trustworthily transfer knowledge from large-scale data to the parameters of the pre-training model. Our model scale has reached GPT-3 level, i.e. 175B.

I am always open for collaborations!

📣 I have several internship positions. Self-motivated students with experience in NLP and PLM are welcome.

News

Publications

† indicates intern/student under my supervision. ✉️ means corresponding author.

Competitions and Shared Tasks

  • SuperGLUE Benchmark, ranked 1st with an average score of 91.3 (since Oct. 8 2022).
  • WMT 2022, ranked 1st on Chinese<=>English, German<=>English, Czech<=>English, and English=>Russian, 2nd on Russian=>English and Japanese=>English, and 3rd on English=>Japanese General Translation Tasks, respectively.
  • GLUE Benchmark, ranked 1st with an average score of 91.3 (since Jan. 1 2022).
  • IWSLT21, ranked 1st on Swahili-English speech translation task.
  • WMT20, ranked 2nd on German-to-English chat translation shared task.
  • Tencent AI Innovation Competition, ranked 3rd on "input tips in human-computer interaction translation" problem.
  • WMT19, ranked 1st on Finnish-to-English news translation shared task.
  • CWMT17, ranked 3rd on the Japanese-to-Chinese patent translation shared task.

Professional Services

  • Action Editor: ACL Rolling Review 2021
  • Area Chair: ACL 2022
  • Session Chair: AAAI 2023/ SDM 2021
  • Conference Committee: ACL/ EMNLP/ COLING/ NAACL/ EACL/ AACL/ KDD/ SDM/ ICML/ NeurIPS/ ICML/ AAAI/ IJCAI/ CVPR/ ICCV/ WACV etc.
  • Journal Reviewer: Knowledge-Based Systems/ Computational Linguistics/ ACM Transactions on the Web (Distinguished Reviewer)/ IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing/ Natural Language Engineering/ ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing/ Neural Computation/ Neurocomputing/ IEEE Transactions on Multimedia etc.
  • Member: ACL (2020-)/ IEEE (2020-)

Group Members

I am always fortunate to work with these brilliant students (both onsite and remote, see alumni here), they are:
  • Changtong Zan (PhD from China University of Petroleum, 07/2021-present)
  • Qihuang Zhong (PhD from Wuhan University, 09/2021-present)
  • Yibin Lei (Master from Eindhoven University of Technology, 09/2022-present)
  • Qingyue Wang (PhD from Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 09/2022-present)
  • Keqin Peng (PhD from Beihang University, 09/2022-present)
  • Fei Wang (PhD from South China University of Technology, 09/2022-present)
  • Rong Bao (PhD from Fudan University, 09/2022-present)
  • Shizhan Cai (Bachelor from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 11/2022-present)
  • Ziyang Xu (Master from Wuhan University, 11/2022-present)

Selected Awards

  • 2022-23: Technology Golden Award (京东集团技术金项奖), the highest tech. award at JD.com, Inc.
  • 2022: Superior AI Leader Award, The World Artificial Intelligence Conference.
  • 2018: Beijing Outstanding Graduate, The Education Committee of Beijing.
  • 2013: National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of P.R.China.

*Last updated on 05/2023.