Email: liwei AT sidepark DOT org

Homepage: http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_index1.aspx?typeid=128262&userid=362400

Dr. Li is a computational linguist with years of work experiences in Natural Language Processing (NLP).  Dr. Li's background involves both a solid research track record and substantial industrial software development experiences.  He is now Chief Scientist in a US company, leading the technology team in developing the core engine for extracting sentiments and text analytics for the consumer insight and business search products.  Dr. Li led the NLP team and solved the problem of answering how-question: this was the technology foundation for the launch of the research product serving the technology community.  After that, he directed the team in automatic sentiment analysis and solved the problem of answering why-questions.  This effort has resulted in the launch of the product for extracting consumer insights from social media.  He is currently leading the effort for multilingual NLP efforts and for identifying demographic information for social media IDs.  

In his previous job, Dr. Li was Principal Investigator (PI) at Cymfony on 17 federal grants from the DoD SBIR (AF and Navy) contracts in the area of NLP/IE (Information Extraction). These efforts led to the development and deployment of a suite of InfoXtract engine and products, including Cymfony’s BrandDashboard, Harmony and Influence as well as Janya’s Semantex engine for the government deployment.  Dr. Li led the effort in winning the first competition at TREC-8 (Text Retrieval Conference 1999) in its natural language Question Answering (QA) track.  Dr. Li has published extensively in refereed journals and high-profile international conferences such as ACL and COLING, in the areas of question answering, parsing, word sense disambiguation, information extraction and knowledge discovery.

• 2005.11- present

• Chief Scientist

  
  Dr. Wei Li leads the development of Netbase's core research and natural language processing (NLP) team.
  
  Major responsibilities: Direct R&D; natural language parsing; transfer technology; business information extraction; sentiment analysis.

  • Architect and key developer of the NLP platform for parsing English into logical forms
  • Architect and key developer for question answering and business information extraction based on parsing
  • Design and direct to develop sentiment analysis in Benefit Frame, Problem Frame, 360 Frame, and Preference Frame.
  • Supports technology transfer into product features in three lines of commercially deployed products
  
  
• 1997.11-2005.11 Vice President for R&D/NLP, Cymfony Inc. / Janya Inc. (Cymfony spin-off since 2005.08) 
  Principal Research Scientist since 01/1998 
  VP since 09/1999

   

  Dr. Wei Li lead the development of Cymfony/Janya’s core research and natural language processing (NLP) team.

  Major responsibilities: Direct R&D; write grant proposals; transfer technology; develop linguistic modules.

  • Chief architect for the core technology InfoXtract for broad coverage NLP and Information Extraction (IE): designed and developed the key modules for parsing, relationship extraction and event extraction
  • Instrumental in helping to close the seed funding and the first round of financing of over 11 million dollars in 2000 and to develop a tiny 2-staff company when I joined it in 1996 into a 60+ staff technology company in the IT (Information Technology) sector of US industry, with offices in Buffalo, Boston and Bangalore (India) before the spin-off
  • Responsible for technology transfer: designed the key features brand tagging, message tracking and quote extraction for the Cymfony flagship product Brand Dashboard(TM)
  • Cymfony has been nominated for US Small Business Administration Prime Contractor of the Year Award several times for its outstanding government work
  • Cymfony’s commercial product has won numerous awards including the Measurement Standard’s Third Annual Product of the Year Award, Finalist for the MITX Awards 2004, Finalist For 19th Annual Codie Award, 2003 Massachusetts Interactive Media Council (MIMC) Awards
  • Cymforny has been named 100 Companies that matter in Knowledge Management by KMWold together with other industry leaders
  • Pincipal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI for 17 SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1, Phase 2 and Enhancement) grants (about eight million dollars) from DoD (Department of Defense) of US in the area of intelligent information retrieval and extraction
    • PI, Fusion of Entity Information from Textual Data Sources (Phase I $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF),, Contract No. FA8750-05-C-0163 (2005)
    • PI, Automated Verb Sense Identification (Phase II $750,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (Navy), Contract No. N00178-03-C-1047 (2003-2005)
    • PI, Automated Verb Sense Identification (Phase I $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (Navy), Contract No. N00178-02-C-3073 (2002-2003)
    • Co-PI, An Automated Domain Porting Toolkit for Information Extraction (Phase II $750,000, Enhancement $830,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), Contract No. F30602-03-C-0044 (2003-2006)
    • Co-PI, An Automated Domain Porting Toolkit for Information Extraction (Phase I $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), Contract No. F30602-02-C-0057(2002-2003)
    • Co-PI, A Large Scale Knowledge Repository and Information Discovery Portal Derived from Information Extraction (Phase II $750,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF) (2004-2006)
    • Co-PI, A Large Scale Knowledge Repository and Information Discovery Portal Derived from Information Extraction (Phase I, $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF) (2003-2004)
    • Co-PI, Automatically Time Stamping Events in Unrestricted Text (Phase I $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), (2003-2004)
    • Co-PI, Fusion of Information from Diverse, Textual Media: A Case Restoration Approach (Phase I, $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), Contract No. F30602-02-C-0156 (2002-2003)
    • PI, Intermediate-Level Event Extraction for Temporal and Spatial Analysis and Visualization (Phase II, $750,000; Enhancement $500,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), Contract No. F30602-01-C-0035 (2001-2003)
    • PI, Intermediate-Level Event Extraction for Temporal and Spatial Analysis and Visualization (Phase I, $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), Contract No. F30502-00-C-0090 (2000-2001)
    • PI, Flexible Information Extraction Learning Algorithm (Phase II, $750,000; Enhancement $500,000) , U.S. DoD SBIR (AF) Contract No. F30602-00-C-0037 (2000-2002)
    • PI, Flexible Information Extraction Learning Algorithm (Phase I, $100,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF) Contract No. F30602-99-C-0102 (1999-2000)
    • PI, A Domain Independent Event Extraction Toolkit (Phase II, $750,000), U.S. DoD SBIR (AF), Contract No. F30602-98-C-0043 (1998-2000)
• 1986-1991 Assistant Researcher, Institute of Linguistics, CASS (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

  R & D for Project of JFY Machine Translation Engine from English to Chinese (using COBOL)

• 1988-1991 Senior Engineer, Gaoli Software Company

  instrumental in turning the research prototype JFY into a real life software product GLMT for English-to-Chinese Machine Translation

  • trained and supervised lexicographers in building up a lexicon of 60,000 entries
  • supervised the testing of thousands of lexicon rules
  • GLMT 1.0 successfully marketed in 1992
  • GLMT won nemerous prizes, including Silver Medal, INFORMATICS’92 (Singapore 1992); Gold Medal for Electronic Products at Chinese Science & Technology Exhibition (Beijing, 1992) and various other software prizes (Beijing 1992-1995)
  • technology partially transferred to VTECH Electronics Ltd in the product of pocket electronic translator
• 1988 Contract grammarian, BSO Software Company, Utrecht, The Netherlands 
  Chinese Dependency Syntax Project, for use in multi-lingual MT

   

  
  (3) Education
• 2001 PhD in Computational Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, Canada

  Thesis: The Morpho-syntactic Interface in a Chinese Phrase Structure Grammar

• 1992 PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics, CCL/UMIST, UK
•  
• 1986 M.A. in Machine Translation, Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

  Thesis: Automatic Translation from Esperanto to English and Chinese

  (4) Prizes and Honors
• 2001 Outstanding Achievement Award, Department of Linguistics, 
  Simon Fraser University 
  (award given to the best PhD graduates from the department)
• 1995-1997 G.R.E.A.T. Award, Science Council, B.C. CANADA 
  (an industry-based grant, funding the effort to bridge my Ph.D. research with the 
  local industrial needs)
• 1997 President’s Research Stipend, SFU, CANADA
• 1996 Travel grant for attending ICCC in Singapore, by ICCC’96
• 1995 Graduate Fellowship (merit-based), SFU, CANADA
• 1992 Software Second Prize (Aiping Fu and Wei Li), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 
  for machine translation database software
• 1991 Sino-British Friendship Scholarship, supporting my PhD program in UK 
  (a prestigious scholarship designed to award Chinese young scientists for overseas training in England in a nation-wide competition, administered jointly by the British Council, Sir Pao Foundation and the Education Ministry of China)

   

  (5) Professional Activities
• Editor, International Editorial Board for Journal of Chinese Language and Computing
• Industrial Advisor, supervising over 20 Graduate Student Interns from SUNY/Buffalo (since 1998)
• Reviewer, Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-05)
• Member, Program committee for 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2004)
• Reviewer, Mark Maybury (ed.) New Directions in Question Answering, The AAAI Press, 2003
• Member, Program committee for The 17th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC17), 2003.
• Member, Program committee for 20th International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages (ICCPOL2003), 2003.
• Panelist, Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering (COLING-2002 Workshop)
• Invited talk, ‘Information Extraction and Natural Language Applications’, National Key Lab for NLP, Qinghua University, Beijing, Feb. 2001
• Member, Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• Member, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 
  

   

  (6) Languages
• English: fluent
• Chinese: native
• French: Intermediate (learned 3 years)
• Esperanto: fluent (published in Esperanto)
• Russian: elementary (learned 1 year) 
  

   

  (7) Publications

  A complete list of publications are available on-line at http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_content.aspx?id=295975