Founded in 1980 by Prof. Tianshun Yao and now led by Prof. Jingbo Zhu, Natural Language Processing Laboratory at Northeastern University (NEU-NLPLab) has long been involved in the research of computational linguistics, focusing on language parsing, text mining, and machine translation etc.

After over two decades' sustained work by its talented staff and students, NEU-NLPLab ranks among the top notch research bases with its high international prestige, advanced theoretical research and well-established industrial development capabilities.

Research Team

Research Interests

Research Facilities

• Working space of 500 square meters (10 rooms) with superior work environment, all computers accessed to intranet as well as internet and CERNET via NEU campus net;

• 1 Dell server and 1 Sun work station;

• Over 40 high performance PCs.

Development Route Map

1980 NEUNLP Lab was founded by Prof. Yao Tianshun, who then worked as a visiting scholar at Kongandao Machine Translation Research Center of Chinese University of Hong Kong, and initiated his research in the area of machine translation.

1984 NEUNLP Lab designed and implemented a Chinese-English machine translation model based on Schank’s conceptual depending theory.

1987-1994 NEUNLP Lab took part in the research of CICC Asian Multilingual Machine Translation System (together with other scholars from China, Japan, Thailand, Malay and Indonesia), directed by European Community. Our lab was in charge of the research on Chinese analysis. After we honored our mission in 1989, we accomplished our own Chinese-English machine translation system.

1990-1994 NEUNLP Lab worked on the “905 project” co-granted by Ministry of Electronics Industry and State Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), namely, the research and implementation of Chinese Information Processing Platform (CIPP).

1992 NEUNLP Lab cooperated with Chinese University of Hong Kong on the research of Automatic Text Categorization using our self-developed language parser, and have maintained our close partnership ever since.

1992 NEUNLP Lab launched its work on the project of Basic Research for Understanding Chinese and Other Languages (863-306-03-06-1).

Nov. 1992 The monograph Natural Language Processing—A research of making computers understand human languages(1st edition), authored by Professor Yao Tianshun, was published by Tsinghua University Press.

1993 Prof. Yao Tianshun was elected a member of International Oriental Languages Computer Society due to NEUNLP Lab’s achievements under his leadership.

1995-2000 NEUNLP Lab initiated the research of Chinese-English-Korean Multilingual Machine Translation System with Korean Pohang University of Science and Technology (KPUST) and achieved its fulfillment.

1997 NEUNLP Lab fulfilled translation of Kreisler Driver’s Manual into multiple languages with the computer’s help, entrusted by American BERLITZ Translation Company, and our translation was openly released in USA.

1998 NEUNLP Lab took part in the National Key Project for Basic Research: Image, Voice, Natural Language Understanding and Knowledge Discovery. We were responsible for Chinese-English Machine Translation Evaluation system (G19980305011), which was the first fully automatic evaluation project of machine translation ever launched in China.

1999 NEUNLP Lab cooperated with Motorola China Research Center on the research of language processing techniques for TTS (Text to Speech), and worked out the language parser. We honored the contract to our partner’s satisfaction.

2001 NEUNLP Lab cooperated with Princeton-Panasonic Information and Networking Technology Laboratory on network OCR linguistic postprocessing, and fulfilled the research in the following year.

2002 NEUNLP Lab cooperated with KPUST to develop Chinese-Korean Machine Translation System (CK99-03), approved by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

2002 NEUNLP Lab undertook the project of Content Identification and Information Filtering Techniques (863-301-7-7), granted by the expert panel of National High-tech Intelligent Computer System.

May 2002 The monograph Natural Language Processing—A research of making computers understand human languages (2nd edition), co-authored by Professor Yao Tianshun, Professor Zhu Jingbo and Professor Zhang Li, was published by Tsinghua University Press.

2003-2005 NEUNLP Lab launched its research of ontology-based topic identification and text structure analysis techniques, co-sponsored by National Natural Science Funds and Microsoft Research Asia.

2004 NEUNLP Lab cooperated with Fuji Xerox Japan on research and development of Chinese-Japanese Machine Translation System, involving theories and techniques of example-based, template-based, statistics-based machine translation, and building large-scale bilingual corpus.

2005 NEUNLP Lab cooperated with France Telecom R&D Beijing in the research of information extraction key techniques and semantics-based content relevance calculation.

July 2006 NEUNLP Lab accomplished the Olympic News Based Machine Translation System, the first-phase project under its contract with Fuji Xerox Japan, and then proceeded with its second-phase project.