Zhao Dongyan is a professor in Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology (WICT), Peking University (PKU).
His major research interests include Natural Language Processing, Semantic Data Management and Knowledge-based Intelligent System. Recently, I am interested in several research topics including Information Extraction, Knowledge Graph, Question Answering & Reading Comprehension, Dialogue System and Knowledge-based Intelligence applications.
As a distinguished member of China Computer Federation (CCF), he was the secretary-general of CCF TCCI (Technical Committee on Chinese Information Technology, renamed as CCF TCNLP (Technical Committe on Natural Language Processing) in 2020, from 2010 to 2019. He is also a member of CCF Advisory Committee of Big Data and member of CCF Network and Data Communications, as well as a senior member of CIPS Social Media Processing Committee. He is deputy secretary-general of the National News Publishing Information Standardization Technical Committee and a member of the National Chinese News Information Standardization Technical Committee.
He has led eight national-level projects, including National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Key Development Project, etc. He has published over 100 academic papers (more than 70 of them are top ranked by CCF, such as ACL, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, WWW, SIGMOD, VLDB; AI, TODS, VLDB Journal, TKDE etc.) and holds 23 granted invention patents. He has received national and provincial awards seven times, including National Awards of Scientific and Technological Process, Second Prize (The first contributor).. He has been honored with the 10th China Youth Science and Technology Award (2007) and Special Award of Technological Innovation titled "Honor of Science and Technology" by Beijing Municipal Government (2007).
He has been focused on natural language processing and large-scale semantic data management for a long time. In the past five years, he has led the development of a series of cutting-edge technologies, including open-domain semantic knowledge base construction with automatic scalability and quality control, knowledge-based semantic understanding and natural language question answering, and semantic search engines. He has also conducted industry applications for intelligent knowledge services. The PKUBase based on these technologies is one of the earliest and largest-scale semantic knowledge bases built by research institutions in China. The knowledge-based semantic understanding and natural language question answering system achieved first place in the international authoritative evaluation QALD by the European Union for three consecutive years, and first place in the TREC Microblog Retrieval Task by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States for two years.
