Ming Zhou

Career

Zhou completed a doctorate in computer science at Harbin Institute of Technology in 1991, where the thesis research produced CEMT-I, an early Chinese-English machine translation system. From 1991 to 1999 Zhou did postdoctoral research and taught at Tsinghua University, and from 1993 to 1999 led development of J-Beijing, a Chinese-Japanese machine translation product for Kodensha.¹

Zhou joined Microsoft Research Asia in 1999 and led its NLP research for 21 years, rising to vice president, before leaving at the end of 2020. Zhou then founded Langboat Technology, officially established in June 2021, which develops the Mengzi language models and applies them in fields such as finance. Zhou has also served as president of the ACL and vice chairman of the China Computer Federation.¹²

Research

At Microsoft Research Asia, Zhou's group worked on statistical and then neural machine translation, contributing methods later built into Microsoft Translator, and on language-learning tools such as the English Writing Assistant (2005) and Engkoo (2010), later offered through Bing. The group also built a statistical input method for Chinese and Japanese in Windows (2001) and a system for generating Chinese couplets with phrase-based statistical machine translation.¹

Zhou's teams provided the retrieval-based and neural response engines behind Microsoft's XiaoIce chatbot, first released in 2015, and later worked on pre-trained models, including UniLM, which uses a shared Transformer with self-attention masks for both language understanding and generation. At Langboat, Zhou co-authored the 2021 Mengzi report on lightweight Chinese pre-trained models.¹³⁴

Work and contributions

• UniLM (Unified Language Model Pre-training) Published research

  Co-author of the NeurIPS 2019 paper presenting UniLM, a pre-trained Transformer that can be fine-tuned for both language understanding and generation; the paper links its code and pre-trained models, and Langboat's biography describes UniLM as led by Zhou.³¹

• Mengzi Published research

  Co-author of the 2021 technical report releasing Mengzi, a family of lightweight discriminative, generative, domain-specific, and multimodal pre-trained models for Chinese.⁴

Timeline

1. 1991Completed a doctorate at Harbin Institute of Technology, building the CEMT-I Chinese-English translation system.¹
2. 1993Began leading development of the J-Beijing Chinese-Japanese machine translation product for Kodensha.¹
3. 1999Joined Microsoft Research Asia, where Zhou led natural language processing research.¹
4. 2005Zhou's group created the English Writing Assistant, later integrated into Microsoft Office.¹
5. 2010Zhou's group created Engkoo, a bilingual language-assistance system later released by Bing.¹
6. May 8, 2019Co-authored the UniLM paper on unified language model pre-training.³
7. 2020Left Microsoft Research Asia at the end of the year to start a language model company.¹
8. Jun 2021Langboat Technology, founded by Zhou, was officially established.¹
9. Oct 13, 2021Co-authored the Mengzi technical report on lightweight Chinese pre-trained models.⁴

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Vice President; led natural language processing research (1999–2020), Microsoft Research Asia¹²
• Postdoctoral research and teaching (1991–1999), Tsinghua University¹

Honors and recognition

• ACL Fellow · Association for Computational Linguistics¹
• Fellow of the China Computer Federation · China Computer Federation¹
• Wuzhen Internet Leading Technology Award (for UniLM) · World Internet Conference, 2019¹

Where they work

• Langboat Technology 1 person in the wiki

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