On May 15, ACL 2019, the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, announced the list of accepted papers. According to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), this year’s submission total is 2694 pieces, up by 375% from last year. Among all the papers accepted by ACL 2019, 10 come from Baidu, demonstrating the company’s technical strengths and world-class research in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

Established in 1962, ACL is one of the most influential and dynamic international academic organizations in NLP. Having academic papers accepted by its annual meeting means one’s research efforts are recognized by the international academic community.

The 10 accepted papers from Baidu cover many hot and cutting-edge research topics in NLP, such as information extraction, machine reading comprehension, dialogue system, video understanding and machine translation. The papers present a number of innovative research results such as the framework ARNOR (Attention Regularization based NOise Reduction), the deep fusion model KT-NET for language representation and knowledge representation, a multi-granularity cross-modal attention mechanism, and a co-reference resolution based on end-to-end deep reinforcement learning, all of which add great value to the applications of human-computer interaction, intelligent customer service, video understanding, machine translation and other use scenarios.

Such achievements of Baidu’s is not a surprise to the international community. The brain behind is Dr. Haifeng Wang, Senior Vice President and Head of Baidu Research Institute, one of the renowned academic leaders in the field of NLP. He was the president of ACL in 2013 as the first Chinese president in the organization’s 50-year history. He is also the founding chair of Asia-Pacific Chapter of the ACL (AACL) in 2018 and currently an ACL Fellow. ACL has endorsed Dr. Wang for his great contributions to machine translation, NLP and search engine technology, in both academia and industry.

Led by Dr. Wang, Baidu’s NLP team has been holding a leading position in developing and applying NLP technologies. The team has trained and attracted a lot of talents from academia and industry at home and abroad.

Supporting many aspect of Baidu's businesses, Baidu NLP is the core of the company’s intelligent search, news feed, smart home and other products. Meanwhile, Baidu proactively opens up its NLP technologies to empower all kinds of industries. As the key capability of the Baidu Brain open platform, Baidu NLP technologies see more than 100 billion daily API requests by companies from various industries including internet, finance, healthcare, retail, mobility, service and more. While the whole world is actively embracing Artificial Intelligence, Baidu NLP has already made significant contributions to the intelligent upgrade of industries in China.