Maosong Sun - Biography#
Prof. Maosong Sun has been working in natural language processing(NLP), a vital sub-field of artificial intelligence, for over 30 years. A key feature of his research is multidisciplinary concerning computer science, human languages, humanities, social sciences and education. He has:
1) Made significant contributions in NLP, especially in Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging, keyword extraction and social tagging, representation learning, knowledge graph, machine translation and poetry generation. He has published over 200 papers at top-tier or peer-reviewed conferences and journals of NLP and AI and received 11,000+ citations in Google Scholar with h-index 47 and i10-idex 171. He has also developed many well-adopted toolkits based on the above research and open-sourced in Github, under three directories: THUNLP (https://github.com/thunlp
), THUMT (https://github.com/THUNLP-MT) and THUNLP-AIPOET (https://github.com/thunlp-aipoet) , obtaining 15300+ stars in total that indicates these computational resources are welcomed by researchers worldwide. 2) Led several large research projects including a key project targeting at Chinese computing on the web (4 million US$), funded by the National Key Basic Research and Development Program of China (the only scholar from NLP area in China who got this type of funding), and NExT++, a joint research program of the National University of Singapore, Tsinghua University and University of Southampton, funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore(14.6 million US$).
3) Established the NLP and Computational Humanities & Social Sciences Lab at Tsinghua University in 2008, the first lab in China which stresses large span interdisciplinary research. He led many interesting research along this line, e.g. conducted a Chinese classical poetry generation system Jiuge in 2015(http://jiuge.thunlp.cn/), the most popular AI system of the same type.
4) Developed XuetangX, the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform of Tsinghua University in 2012 (https://next.xuetangx.com
) which is free for online learners worldwide. This is the first and most influential Chinese MOOC platform and now becomes three largest MOOC platforms in the world, having attracted over 58.8 million registered learners with 183 million course registrations.