Zhirui Zhang(张志锐)

Algorithm Expert at Alibaba Group

I am currently an Algorithm Expert in the Language Technology Lab at Alibaba DAMO Academy. I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Science and Technology (USTC) in 2019, supervised by Prof. Enhong Chen from USTC and Prof. Harry Shum from MSRA. Prior to that, I obtained my bachelor degree from USTC in 2014. So far, I have published more than 10 papers in top AI conferences.

Research Interests:
Neural Machine Translation, Dialogue System, Natural Language Processing, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Natural Language Generation
Email: zrustc11@gmail.com

We are recruiting research interns for our Lab in Alibaba DAMO Academy at Alibaba Group! If you are interested in my research and projects, please do not hesitate to email me.

Publications _{^{[Google Scholar]}}

2020

• Junliang Guo, Zhirui Zhang, Linli Xu, Hao-Ran Wei, Boxing Chen and Enhong Chen. Incorporating BERT into Parallel Sequence Decoding with Adapters. The 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020). [paper][code]
• Hao-Ran Wei, Zhirui Zhang, Boxing Chen and Weihua Luo. Iterative Domain-Repaired Back-Translation. The 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020). [paper][code]
• Baijun Ji, Zhirui Zhang, Xiangyu Duan, Min Zhang, Boxing Chen and Weihua Luo. Cross-lingual Pre-training Based Transfer for Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation. The 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020). [paper]

2019

• Zhirui Zhang, Xiujun Li, Jianfeng Gao and Enhong Chen. Budgeted Policy Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems. The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019). [paper]
• Zhirui Zhang, Shuangzhi Wu, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Tong Xu. Regularizing Neural Machine Translation by Target-bidirectional Agreement. The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019). [paper]
• Shuo Ren*, Zhirui Zhang*, Shujie Liu, Ming Zhou and Shuai Ma. Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with SMT as Posterior Regularization. The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019). (* equal contribution) [paper][code]

2018

• Hany Hassan, Anthony Aue, Chang Chen, Vishal Chowdhary, Jonathan Clark, Christian Federmann, Xuedong Huang, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, William Lewis, Mu Li, Shujie Liu, Tie-Yan Liu, Renqian Luo, Arul Menezes, Tao Qin, Frank Seide, Xu Tan, Fei Tian, Lijun Wu, Shuangzhi Wu, Yingce Xia, Dongdong Zhang, Zhirui Zhang and Ming Zhou. Achieving Human Parity on Automatic Chinese to English News Translation, 2018. [arxiv]
• Zhirui Zhang*, Shuo Ren*, Shujie Liu, Jianyong Wang, Peng Chen, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Enhong Chen. Style Transfer as Unsupervised Machine Translation, 2018. (* equal contribution) [arxiv]
• Shuangzhi Wu, Dongdong Zhang, Zhirui Zhang, Nan Yang, Mu Li and Ming Zhou. Dependency-to-Dependency Neural Machine Translation. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2018.
• Wenhu Chen, Guanlin Li, Shujie Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Mu Li, Ming Zhou. Approximate Distribution Matching for Sequence-to-Sequence Learning, 2018. [arxiv]
• Zhirui Zhang, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Enhong Chen. Bidirectional Generative Adversarial Networks for Neural Machine Translation. The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2018). [paper]
• Zhirui Zhang, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Enhong Chen. Coarse-To-Fine Learning for Neural Machine Translation. The 7th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2018). [paper]
• Zhirui Zhang, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Enhong Chen. Joint Training for Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data. The 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018). [paper]
• Wenhu Chen, Guanlin Li, Shuo Ren, Shujie Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Mu Li and Ming Zhou. Generative Bridging Network in Neural Sequence Prediction. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2018). [paper]
• Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Zhao Yan, Zhirui Zhang, Yibo Sun, Shujie Liu, Yuanhua Lv and Ming Zhou. Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2018). [paper]

2017

• Zhirui Zhang, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Enhong Chen. Stack-based Multi-layer Attention for Transition-based Dependency Parsing. The 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2017). [paper]

Experience and Education

Experience

July 2019 — Now
Algorithm Expert, Language Technology Lab, Alibaba DAMO Academy
Conducting development and research for Alibaba Translation, mentored by Boxing Chen and Weihua Luo.

Feb. 2019 — June 2019
Research Intern, Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia
Conducting research in NLP and ML fields, mentored by Shujie Liu.

July 2018 - Jan. 2019
Research Intern, Business AI Group, Microsoft AI & Research, Redmond
Conducting research in Dialogue System, mentored by Xiujun Li and Jianfeng Gao.

July 2015 - July 2018
Research Intern, Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia
Conducting research in NLP and ML fields (Joint Ph.D. program), mentored by Mu Li.

July 2013 - June 2014
Research Intern, Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia
Conducting research in Distributed Word Representation (Pre-Ph.D. program) , mentored by Mu Li.

Education

Sept. 2014 - June 2019
Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science & Joint Ph.D. Program with Microsoft Research Asia
Co-advisors: Enhong Chen and Harry Shum
University of Science and Technology of China

Sept. 2010 - June 2014
B.S. in Computer Science
University of Science and Technology of China

Conference Service

• 2021 Program Committee: AAAI
• 2020 Program Committee: AAAI, ACL, IJCAI, NeurIPS, COLING, INLG
• 2019 Program Committee: NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, INLG

Awards

• 2013. Google Excellent Scholarship
• 2013. National Scholarship